Zooey is designed to be unique in three area's: accessibility, device orientation and household assistance. First, greater accessibility allows for intriguing social impacts. Through Zooey's voice recognition and text-to-speech abilities, usage is nearly 100 percent hands-free. This could redefine how an individual goes about their routine by organization and minimization of mundane activities. Also, it is important for those that have impairments impacting their mobility. Second, we desired a virtual assistant that would work well on a PC device. While Siri and Cortana dominate the mobile market, they leave a lot to be desired when working on a desktop or laptop. Third, Zooey offers many features aiding individuals with simple, yet important, tasks around the house. Zooey is able to locate any file on your computer, open it, and then close it when specified. Along with this, users are able to access a particular search engine and search a specified topic. Zooey features the ability to turn on and off lights wirelessly by command. Furthermore, Zooey can utilize 36 mathematical calculations, chat locally across a server and schedule, alter and remove appointments in order to keep one's day organized. In order to construct Zooey, a background is necessary with Python/Java/C++, Win32 API, Networking, Cryptography, Raspberry Pi, utlizing libraries and basic Machine Learning concepts. The motivation behind this projects stems from our desire to learn the concepts listed above in greater detail while designing something that would be useful and interesting. With Zooey nearly complete, the results are beyond what we hoped to accomplish. Not only is Zooey a tool we can use daily, but we can be proud of creating something incredibly complex and ranging over a diverse amount of fields. A potential future feature includes the capacity to send commands to any computer on the network.
**This Abstract was submitted and approved by the CCSCNE for display at their conference in April 2017 and placed tenth in their Undergraduate Research Competition.**
Implement command networking across all PC's on network.
Finish SHA-1 encryption for chat server.
Finish the ability to interact with the users’ environment (turn off lights).
Build associated instructional manual.
Tasks Completed
Able to open/exit any user-specified file by searching throughout all of the users’ drives in their system while utilizing machine learning to accelerate run time by remembering frequent file paths (.exe, .docx, .txt, .cpp, etc.).
Able to search various search engines/websites with user-specified content (Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Dictionary, etc.).
Able to recognize and use the voice of the user (Voice Recognition).
Implement the ability to chat across a local server.
Implement the ability to schedule events and reminders that allow for editing and that will notify the user before the event, remove the event if need be, allow for reoccurring events, and provide events based off a given date.
Able to calculate 36 mathematical functions based off user-input.