Communicating with Vector in French
Can Vector understand and speak French?
When the Vector robot was designed by Anki, the only language he was built for was English. However, since the English language differs across geographies, three different locales were provided: English-US, English-UK, and English-AUS. There was no support for other languages.
Now that Wirepod is the only server and way to run the Vector robot, we do have a workaround way to communicate with Vector in other languages. (I say workaround, because there are still parts which do not work well). This tutorial re-visits what works and what does not work with non-English languages.
To communicate with a user, Vector needs to do three different things:
Comprehend what the user says. This is technically known as Speech to Text Translation (STT)
Generate a response to the text to carry out the conversation.
Translate the response text back to speech.
Note that in theory, only step 2 is required, because that is how our brains work, right… we listen to something and our brain is able to make us speak …