Manuel, the talking moose
I notice a certain silliness – not to say outright frivolity – surrounding some of your Christmas projects. I’d like to introduce Manuel. He’s a talking moose with a Raspberry Pi for brains, who will repeat your tweets in a Scottish accent, live on video. Manuel is a Christmas installation in the office at Torchbox – head over and make him intone your festive messages.
Manuel undergoes mandibular surgery
Manuel (who, if the above photographs are anything to go by, may well be an antlered donkey rather than a moose) has been hacked about, has had new brains (including a profanity filter) inserted, and has been elegantly mounted on the office wall, the better to intone your tweets. I hope he doesn’t end up in a cupboard after Christmas.
17 comments
Montekuri
Let’s join with the BeetBox Project and make Manuel produce the sounds with its mouth.
Montekuri
Ah, and this project reminds me of an old TV show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcaOrw0QCa0
Daniel Radcliffe
Wow, thats pretty cool :)
Sugarfix
It *should* remind you of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khgpg-9TjVM
svenn
Epic. love it :D
John
I believe he broke :/
Bruce Goatly
Yeah, he’s mostly just saying ‘slashslashslash…’ which is a tad disturbing.
Mr Nutz
Maybe somebody connected him to a Linux roguelike and he’s really slashing dungeon creatures to get the amulet of Yendor.
psergiu
What text-to-speech program is he using and what are the settings for the scottish accent ?
liz
Hoots. No idea.
Binoy Xavier Joy
Try them out http://elinux.org/RPi_Text_to_Speech_(Speech_Synthesis)
Matt Westcott
The text-to-speech program is Festival, using the ‘cmu_us_awb_arctic’ voice. (Festival was originally developed at the University of Edinburgh, and this voice is actually the lead developer, Alan W Black. Not sure how he’d feel about being the voice of Manuel, but I expect he’s used to this sort of thing by now!) http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=751169 is a nice guide to getting Festival set up with custom voices.
pgix
How about getting him to sing something by the pretenders? :)
Ravenous
Is “Manuel” a Fawlty Towers reference by any chance? (There was a moose or something on one of the episodes… or maybe it’s just a coincidence.)
VSB
Is manual a reference to a Falty Towers episode?
GordonTGopher
Pocket Lint website of the day;http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/48838/tweet-to-a-talking-moose
malcolmf
Oh my.
My first thought was, since the original went missing years ago, what we need now is a Pi-powered
Philip K Dick simulacrum
Back then they were really stretching what could be done with the hardware, it’s probably not practical with something as small as a Pi. But wouldn’t it be fun?
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