Nao Reads Appointments From a Google Calendar

As a brief update on some of my project ideas for Nao (which I mentioned in my last blog post), I have prototyped access to Google data via the gData API. Using the Google Calendar as a test bed, Nao can access the secure, private calendar feed and read appointments out via his text to speech sub system. There is more information after the break but here is a short video.

Time and Tide waits for no man.....

First an apology. I have been paricularly lax in posting to the blog and I really have no excuse. Well, I do, but they are the same old ones everyone uses this time of the year. What with holidays and quite a heavy work load the days have turned into weeks and the weeks to months. This means I just haven't made the time to update the blog. That is now changing.

After a very restfull break in North Wales (pictures in the read more section), I came back to see my Nao sitting waiting patiently for me to do some more work with him. This has lead to a shortlist of development projects that I have put as priority items.

1. Updated version of the Animal Card Game
I will be updating the animal card game. The updated version will provide both English and French versions, a score tracking feature, new animations and additional milestones, such a 5 correct in a row and the like.

2. Google Calendar Integration
I have been looking at the GData api's and my first attempt at getting this all working will be a simple Nao behaviour to tell you what appointments you have on a specific day. I have done some work on this and am retrieving the Calandar data via the .Net api, now I need to think about either, converting the gData code to python (they have an API wrapper for that) or developing a Windows service that feeds the data to Nao.

3. Story Telling
I am very intrigued by the way children react to Nao. It really is quite facinating. With this in mind I wanted to create some additional behaviours for children. The first will be a story telling behaviour that will read its data from an uploaded file, which will contain both the story and references to the animations to be used to tell it. The complete process will eventually include an authoring tool as well.

So that's what is in the pipeline. I will post more frequent updates, videos and pictures as I move forward.