Talk to the Bot – Giving Dr. Oblivion an Offer to Become a Super Robot to Take Over the World

For my choice of assignment this week, I decided to do the Talk to the Bot assignment. I actually did the Consult with your doctor as one of my optional assignments for a previous week, so I already had experience generating speech from Dr. Oblivion and creating a narrative. I decided to make my course character, Hwei, ask Dr. Oblivion to become one of his evil sentient robots with a body that would aid him in taking over the world by creating perfect AI beings that would take over humans.

Learning how to generate the lip synced video was a whole different process compared to the original Consult with your doctor assignment. It wasn’t hard, but it really did take a while and I think having a higher end PC and good internet speeds expedited the process for me. The process was streamlined enough to where I only had to click a few buttons and create the right folders. The tutorial given was very helpful for me to follow directions and create the videos.

What really intrigued me was the Python code used for the entire process. There was a “show code” button for each of the processes, and I looked through lines while I waited for my videos to generate. I was fascinated to see how each piece of code worked for the application. and it was definitely some good future personal project ideas for me in the future.

For the Dr. Oblivion clips generated, I was a little disappointed at how the lip sync wasn’t all that great. I’ve seen some other examples at the top of DS106 weekly assignment posts, and those look to be synced a little better than mine. There were parts where at the end of a period, the Doc’s lips kept moving and it felt a little jarring to me. For Hwei’s voice, I used a basic speech generator online to make mp3’s of his voice. I tried to use an AI voice replicator to take the original League of Legends game voice for hwei, but many of them required a paid subscription and was out of reach for me. I spliced it all together by using the Clipchamp online video editor, and it only took a few minutes to put the video, audio, and Hwei’s avatar picture together.

Overall, I had fun with this assignment and I learned a lot about AI generation for audio and video. Hopefully I can even make an AI bot myself with my own code! I’ll make sure to cater it towards taking over the world with AI, or else Hwei might hold my life against me 🙁