Welcome fellow BTSpeak users and anyone interested in the BTSpeak from Blazie Technologies.
I’m very excited to tell you about an up-coming custom app I’m developing for the BTSpeak. It’s called btgpt (or, btg) for short. Btg is a self-voicing chat GPT app designed and customised for the BTSpeak device. You braille in your questions and then btg reads out Chat GPT’s responses aloud, using the DECtalk synthesiser. A future btg release is being considered that will also work with ESpeak, but, for now, btg is DECtalk only.
BTGPT is built around the public domain chatGPT-shell-cli bash script, developed by 0xacx
“A simple, lightweight shell script to use OpenAI’s chatGPT and DALL-E from the terminal without installing python or node.js. The script uses the official ChatGPT model gpt-3.5-turbo with the OpenAI API endpoint” Original chatGPT-shell-cli bash script Original chatGPT-shell-cli Readme file
My sincere thanks to 0xacx; without his extensive efforts in developing the original bash script – which handles all the GPT interaction code – , this enhanced self-voicing BTSpeak app would not have been possible.
Please note that I have endeavoured to keep all the original functionality of the chatGPT-shell-cli script available. It provides a variety of command-line options for specific functionality and non-interactive modes. Only some of these are self-voicing.
however, I have also put in a lot of work to make btg more intuitive and straight-forward to use, easier to configure and with the goal to support less technical users who want to benefit from Chat GPT.
btg allows you to braille in your questions (termed prompts) to the Chat GPT service and have the answers spoken aloud to you in a concise but structured format. It keeps track of your conversation history for the current btg session, so you don’t need to repeat yourself and Chat GPT can refer to your earlier information in its latest response to you.
For its primary operation, btg is self-voicing. this means that it does not need you to review the screen to hear GPT responses or other critical information or errors. However, should you wish to, you can always enter Review mode on the BTSpeak, to see exactly what has been sent to the virtual screen, as sometimes the self voicing feature reformats information for better reading aloud.
Some more advanced features available in the original script, do not currently self voice, but in these instances, review mode is always available.
Note: since the BTSpeak virtual tty screen has a limited number of lines, the BTSpeak review mode only shows text still present on the virtual screen. However, even if the GPT reply is longer than the number of lines on the virtual screen, it will be read out to you in full.
More advanced users may consider installing the GNU ‘screen’ utility. This keeps an extended copy buffer of output to the terminal, allowing you to scroll back to information no longer visible on the screen, or accessible to the BTSpeak review mode. While in the copy buffer you can copy text and append text to a virtual clipboard, and paste it elsewhere in the shell later.
‘Screen’ is not pre-installed on the BTSpeak at this time, so it will need to be installed with the apt package manager.
In addition to self-voicing Chat GPT output,,the additions and enhancements I’ve made to 0xacx’s original Chat GPT script include:
Note: A future version of btg may disable this feature by default, but allow it to be activated via the configuration file.
I’ve put a lot of work into btg already, but there is lots more work still to be done. Although the BTSpeak is generally based on open source software, maintaining device stability is crucial for all users.
For now, to install btg you need to issue bash shell commands. If sufficient care is not taken when in bash, system stability can be compromised!
For that reason, to beta test this early release, you will strictly need to meet the following criteria:
Create an account and get a free API Key here
This file should have the name
.openAI_key
or
.openAPI_key
and be saved in your home directory, which is at
/home/pi
Note! The btg app will not and can not operate unless a valid API key is found when it is run. .
Some familiarity with Unix/Linux/shel commands is desirable. Open an interactive shell on your BTSpeak and experiment with some basic non-destructive Linux commands.
Ability to follow installation instructions TO THE LETTER
Finally, you need to explicitly understand and acknowledge that issuing bash commands carries risks. Tim Noonan takes no responsibility for any possible problems or issues introduced by your installation or use of the btg app!
For now, understand that this app was primarily designed and tested with the DECtalk synthesiser. Tim Noonan makes no guarantees that future versions will support ESpeak or other TTS engines. We are, however, actively investigating ways to make the app more TTS agnostic, to support more users and their preferences – especially for users of non-English speech output.
Please email me Tim@timnoonan.com.au to request to become a beta user. Your email must Confirm the following:
I will then send you a link to the beta page and a password to access it.
That page will contain
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