signals.md

Signals

A signal is an input event triggered by a synapse. When a signal is caught, Kalliope runs attached neurons of the synapse. The signal can be of two types: order and event.

The syntax is the following

signals:
    - signal_type: parameter

Order

Simple order

An order signal is a word, or a sentence caught by the microphone and processed by the STT engine.

Syntax:

signals:
    - order: "<sentence>"

Example:

signals:
    - order: "please do this action"

Important note: SST engines can misunderstand what you say, or translate your sentence into text containing some spelling mistakes. For example, if you say "Kalliope please do this", the SST engine can return "caliope please do this". So, to be sure that your speaking order will be correctly caught and executed, we recommend you to test your STT engine by using the Kalliope GUI and check the returned text for the given order.

Important note: STT engines don't know the context. Sometime they will return an unexpected word. For example, "the operation to perform is 2 minus 2" can return "two", "too", "to" or "2" in english.

Important note: Kalliope will try to match the order in each synapse of its brain. So, if an order of one synapse is included in another order of another synapse, then both synapses tasks will be started by Kalliope.

For example, you have "test my umbrella" in a synapse A and "test" in a synapse B. When you'll say "test my umbrella", both synapse A and B will be started by Kalliope. So keep in mind that the best practice is to use really different sentences with more than one word for your order.

Order with arguments

You can add one or more arguments to an order by adding bracket to the sentence.

Syntax:

signals:
    - order: "<sentence> {{ arg_name }}"
    - order: "<sentence> {{ arg_name }} <sentence>"
    - order: "<sentence> {{ arg_name }} <sentence> {{ arg_name }}"

Example:

signals:
    - order: "I want to listen {{ artist_name }}"
    - order: "start the {{ episode_number }} episode"
    - order: "give me the weather at {{ location }} for {{ date }}"

Here, an example order would be speaking out loud the order: "I want to listen Amy Winehouse" In this example, both word "Amy" and "Winehouse" will be passed as an unique argument called artist_name to the neuron.

If you want to send more than one argument, you must split your argument with a word that Kalliope will use to recognise the start and the end of each arguments. For example: "give me the weather at {{ location }} for {{ date }}" And the order would be: "give me the weather at Paris for tomorrow" And so, it will work too with: "give me the weather at St-Pierre de Chartreuse for tomorrow"

See the input values section of the neuron documentation to know how to send arguments to a neuron.

Important note: The following syntax cannot be used: " {{ arg_name }} {{ arg_name2 }}" as Kalliope cannot know when a block starts and when it finishes.

Event

An event is a way to schedule the launching of a synapse periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals.

The event system is based on APScheduler which it is itself based on Linux crontab. When you declare an event in the signal, Kalliope will schedule the launching of the target synapse.

The syntax of an event declaration in a synapse is the following

signals:
  - event:
      parameter1: "value1"
      parameter2: "value2"

For example, if we want Kalliope to run the synapse every day a 8:30, the event will be declared like this:

- event:
    hour: "8"
    minute: "30"

Parameters

Parameters are keyword you can use to build your event

List of available parameter:

parameter	required	default	choices	comment
year	no	*	4 digit	E.g: 2016
month	no	*	month (1-12)
day	no	*	day of the (1-31)
week	no	*	ISO week (1-53)
day_of_week	no	*	number or name of weekday (0-6 or mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat,sun)	6=Sunday
hour	no	*	hour (0-23)
minute	no	*	minute (0-59)
second	no	*	second (0-59)

Note: You must set at least one parameter from the list of parameter

Expression

Expressions can be used in value of each parameter. Multiple expression can be given in a single field, separated by commas.

Expression	Field	Description
*	any	Fire on every value
*/a	any	Fire every a values, starting from the minimum
a-b	any	Fire on any value within the a-b range (a must be smaller than b)
a-b/c	any	Fire every c values within the a-b range
xrd y	day	Fire on the x -rd occurrence of weekday y within the month
last x	day	Fire on the last occurrence of weekday x within the month
last x	day	Fire on the last day within the month
x,y,z	day	Fire on any matching expression; can combine any number of any of the above expressions

Examples

Web clock radio

Let's make a complete example. We want Kalliope to wake us up each morning of working day (Monday to friday) at 7:30 AM and:

• Wish us good morning
• Give us the time
• Play our favourite web radio

The synapse in the brain would be

  - name: "wake-up"
    signals:
      - event:
          hour: "7"
          minute: "30"
          day_of_week: "1,2,3,4,5"
    neurons:
      - say:
          message:
            - "Good morning"
      - systemdate:
          say_template:
            - "It is {{ hours }} hours and {{ minutes }} minutes"
      - shell: 
          cmd: "mplayer http://192.99.17.12:6410/"
          async: True

After setting up an event, you must restart Kalliope

python kalliope.py start

If the syntax is ok, Kalliope will show you each synapse that it has loaded in the crontab

Add synapse name "wake-up" to the scheduler: cron[day_of_week='1,2,3,4,5', hour='7', minute='30']
Event loaded

That's it, the synapse is now scheduled and will be started automatically.

Make Kalliope say something on the third Friday of June, July, August, November and December at 00:00, 01:00, 02:00 and 03:00

- name: "wake-up"
  signals:
    - event:
        day: "3rd fri"        
        month: "6-8,11-12"
        hour: "0-3"        
  neurons:
    - say:
        message:
          - "This is a schedulled sentence"