Wake-up word detector

Section

Communication - high-level documentation

PAL’s robots features an optional wake-up/sleep keyword monitor, that enables or disables language processing.

This wake-up word monitor is a soft monitor. Speech recognition is always performed in the background; the wake-up word detector monitors the /humans/voices/*/speech topics for configurable keywords, and publish a True or False boolean on the /active_listening whenever, respectively, a wake-up or sleep keyword is detected.

Default wake-up/sleep words

By default, the ‘wakeup’ pattern is ^(hey|hello)\s(robot|robert)(\slisten|)?$, for instance “hey robot listen” or “hello robot” (the speech recognition algorithm often confuses robot and robert, so both are accepted).

The default ‘sleep’ pattern is ^(robot|robert)\s?(please|)\s?(stop listening|sleep)$, for instance one of “robot please stop listening”, “robot stop listening”, “robot please sleep”, “robot sleep”.

API

See the Wake-up word API documentation.

How to change the wake-up/sleep keywords?

You can easily set a custom regular expression as wake-up/sleep keyword via the /wakeup_monitor/set_wakeup_pattern and /wakeup_monitor/set_sleep_pattern.

For instance, for the robot to start listening when you say: “hello robot”, you might want to call:

rosservice call /wakeup_monitor/set_wakeup_pattern   "data: '^hello robot$'"

Another example, for the robot to stop listening when you say “sleep well” or “sleep well little robot”:

rosservice call /wakeup_monitor/set_sleep_pattern   "data: '^sleep well( little robot|)$'"

Your pattern must follow the syntax of the ECMAscript regular expressions (with minor C++-only modifications).

You can also retrieve the current pattern with:

rosservice call /wakeup_monitor/get_sleep_pattern