Coding Jarvis in Python in 2016

It’s tough for an erstwhile Iron Man to work on creating their personal AI assistant on the weekends. Like any other time-pressured inventor without a PhD in computer science and linguistics, I decided to use a library for speech recognition and synthesis. Fortunately, Python offers several choices. Unfortunately, many of simply them don’t work any more. I will discuss the ones that are still functional and can be used with Python 2.7 and Python 3 (up to Python 3.5 at the time of writing).

My AI assistant is actually a little humbler – I call it Samwise

Boidwatching

I’m sure you’re all familiar with Nicolas Cage and his birdlike photoshopped hair.  Or should I say… boidlike hair?

Boids are just a digital attempt to recreate birds in computer simulations, be they in games or for academic purposes. The favored algorithm family to emulate the unpredictability of groups of animals – including birds – is called flocking. And one of the most famous flocking algorithms is the Boids Flocking Algorithm developed by Craig Reynolds.