The new shell plugin is a lot cleaner, only determining how the command
matches once and parsing numbers zero or one times.
Kaylee uses the new API, but there are still some problems. Most
notably, Handler objects have no sorting methods yet, so behavior will
be unpredictable when multiple plugins are loaded.
This gives the darksky plugin a temp_precision option, which allows
users to set the precision with which temperatures are read. It
defaults to 0, not the old hard-coded value of 1, because I decided that
it's not usually useful to hear that much information.
As described in issue #16, commands are now processed in two stages.
First, all plugins get to give a confidence with which they are the
right plugin to handle the command. Then, the one with the highest
confidence gets to run first, and if for some reason it can't handle the
command, other plugins try in turn.
Now you can control media players supporting MPRIS using Kaylee. Just
load the plugin and commands like "play the music", "pause the video",
"previous song", and "next video" magically work.
The cache time is now configurable by the user. If no cache time is
set, the old default of half an hour is still used.
Temperature formatting has been factored out into its own function.
It has the same functionality as my old shell script, but now it's
written in Python. The code is far from the most elegant it could be,
but it's a decent example of how the new plugin API can be used for
something practical.
Finally, some sort of built-in TTS support. When a plugin emits a "tts"
signal, the Kaylee object will receive it and speak the given text
aloud. It even stops listening while it speaks to prevent Kaylee from
talking to herself. If no TTS is configured, it will print the text
instead, but since a default TTS setting is provided in the new
options.json.tmp, that shouldn't happen much.
Currently there's no way for the shell plugin to use TTS. The D-Bus
interface will change that once I get around to making it. Speaking of
D-Bus, UIs are broken again and I'm sure I can fix them once they're
separate processes talking to Kaylee by D-Bus.
After listening to HPR 1284 today, I realized that it's important to
keep configuration of what Kaylee *does* separate from other
configuration. Specifically, once TTS integration is done, voice
configuration will need to be separate from configuration of actions,
because it's common to have several computers with the same actions but
different voices. Therefore, I've moved all configuration about plugins
into a new file called plugins.json.
To reduce the boilerplate code needed for each plugin, the PluginBase
class now pulls out the plugin's options from the configuration object.
They get stored under the reasonably obvious name of ``options``.
The abstract method really just wasn't working at all. Since it doesn't
really hurt anything to be able to instantiate PluginBase, I just
forewent all the metaclass nonsense and made it a normal class.
Now the Kaylee object handles the invalid_sentence_command as well. It
does this by having the last handler for the recognizer's 'finished'
signal. If this handler is ever run, the voice command was obviously
not wanted by any of the plugins, so the invalid_sentence_command should
be run.
Also, I fixed the UIs to work as before. It's a temporary fix!
The plugins shouldn't be in charge of running the
valid_sentence_command. They also certainly shouldn't have to manage
the history file. Both of these functions have been delegated to the
Kaylee object, by way of a 'processed' signal emitted by a plugin as
soon as it knows it will handle the voice command.
Since Kaylee now supports Python plugins that can do arbitrary things
with spoken words, the pass_words option for shell commands seems
somewhat less necessary than before. I never liked it in the first
place, because it was all-or-nothing: there was no non-hackish way to
pass the spoken words to only specific commands. If I ever see a
compelling reason for this feature to come back, it may be
re-implemented in the form of a second shell plugin that passes words to
its commands.
As part of the effort for resolving #12, I've started work on a plugin
API for Kaylee. While very much a work in progress, it will allow
Python plugins to be written, loaded from user configuration, and
hooked in to events from necessary portions of Kaylee to handle voice
commands.
Currently there is only one plugin, a partial implementation of shell
command support as existed previously. It works in that it executes
commands, but several old features are missing. Also, the GUIs are
probably broken, but I'm not worried about that at the moment.
Clara Hobbs