Working hard on Spencer’s firmware

Hi everyone,

I wanted to tell you a bit more about the current state of Spencer's firmware development.

We are making some good progress and putting all of our efforts into implementing new features, smashing bugs and improving Spencer's performance.


Our embedded developer Filip merrily smashing software bugs for your viewing pleasure

Here are the features that are currently working, but still need some polish:

• Voice recognition - it’s currently working really well and you can basically get a string of text that you can simply use in your custom app for Spencer or whatnot
• Voice synthesis (sounds funny because we wanted Spencer to sound like that)
• Fetching simple data from the internet (time, weather, news, Spencer’s geolocation, etc.)
• Joke telling, funny answers to funny questions and other similar gimmicks

Here are the features that we’d like to implement in the future:

• “Spencer, put this on my shopping list or make a list”
• “Spencer, set an alarm or a timer”
• Customizations such as making Spencer call you differently
• Integrations with popular 3rd party services such as google calendar and google keep
• Spencer reminds you about your chores or calendar events for the day
• More advance sentence context understanding using machine learning

Yay! Spencer!

Some other important (but not that interesting) firmware-thingies we are working on are:

• Sound sample compression and decompression in order to squeeze as many corny jokes in your Spencer as possible
• Overall performance optimizations (Spencer gonna go fast)
• Server infrastructure for your Spencers (yes, Spencer needs internet and servers in order to work and we need to make that good and stable as well)

What other features would you folks like to see on your Spencers? I’d love to hear what you think and make Spencer even more fun to use.

Back to work now

- Albert and the busy coder boys