Adios, Manuel
As you may know, we built a tweet, talkin' moose last Christmas. Before we forget him completely, I want to review the short, and not always 'sweet' life of Manuel the Moose.
How did you make a tweet talking Moose?
Inspired by the deer of Cornbury Park, the talking moose scene in Fawlty Towers, and Tom wanting to use 'Text to Speech', we came up with the idea of Manuel the tweet talking moose.
We ordered a fake moose head from an ebay reseller in Canada, and called Tod (an engineer friend of Olly's, who can make anything from coil guns to bollock daggers) to talk about 'enhancements'.
One of our devs, Matthew, hooked into the Twitter API to harvest tweets with #tbxmoose in, put together a node.js script to pipe them into the Festival open source speech synthesiser and got it all running on a Raspberry Pi, a computer small enough to fit in a Moose head.
Meanwhile Tod dusted off his animatronics chops, lopped Manuel's lower jaw off, added the necessary bits and bobs and put him back together again complete with fake teeth and lolling tongue.
The audio feed attaches to this handy little Autotalk Interface Board, which moves the servo in response to audio or speech. The signal is split so it goes into the Autotalk board and into a speaker. Now we can hear Manuel speaking and see his jaw moving, at the same time.
Sarah and James designed and built the site, We rigged up a webcam, hooked it into Ustream and Manuel went live.
Was he a success?
Good question. The figures tell of a pretty successful Christmas stunt:
- Manuel was live for about a week and was viewed 22,316 times
- The biggest referrer was Raspberry Pi with 2.667 followed by Spiegel and Reddit
- Ustream clocked up 2453.4 viewing hours
- Manuel was tweeted 8046 times with another 1201 messages via the web form (which we turned off on day two)
- Best celebrity tweet was by Brian Blessed
- Most popular tweet: 'There's a moose loose about this hoose'
- Number of tweets blocked by profanity filter: 349
However, Manuel was not the perfect office mate. He wasn't always witty and original. He often repeated himself (normally one word over and over). He mis-spelt his way around the swear filter. He was scrupulous when reading out backslashes and other special character aitch-tea-tea-pea-colon-backslash-backslash and so on.
Did I mention his accent? Well lets just say that open source text to speech voices aren't as polished as the nice lady on your TomTom.
Probably the worst thing about Manuel was that he could be senselessly offensive at times. There are plenty of potty mouthed Twitter users out there, and they don't mind what goes on their Twitter streams. Of course, we knew this might happen, but we figured we could take it. Some of the time, it turned out that we couldn't!
So, what has become of him?
Manuel's servo, or the audio driver, packed up on Dec 24th. This was pretty much expected as he wasn't specced to last. We have spares of both, but haven't got round to fixing him yet.
I'd like to fire him up again, and have him speak out @torchbox tweets in the office. We don't get THAT many, and they generally aren't offensive.
So, what are you going to do next year?
Nothing that speaks out loud in our office, that's for sure!
In fact, we may take a break next year. After doing many cool things over the last few years, we don't want to do it just because we feel that we should; we don't want it to be like that. So, we may not do a 'Christmas card' next year. Perhaps we'll turn our attention to 'valentine's day' or 'bonfire day' or 'cycle to work day' instead. Any which way, we'll do our next fun site because we are excited by an idea, rather than because we feel we ought to.
Adios Manuel, RIP.
