Giving a teenage pet turtle an artificial pizza-ordering voice

If B. F. Skinner’s well-known analysis proved something, it’s that nearly all animals are able to a point of coaching. Coaching is basically simply benefiting from an animal’s pure inclination to adapt for survival, which is one thing all residing organisms do. With that in thoughts, YouTuber Bao’s Builds constructed a field to offer his teenage pet turtle a artificial voice able to ordering pizza.

The turtle, Lightning, simply reached its 18^th birthday and Bao determined that this could be the right present. Like these mats coated in buttons that actually sensible canines press with their paws to speak, Bao wished Lightning to have a tool with buttons assigned to particular requests, like “feed me” or “play with me.” Turtles aren’t fairly as clever as border collies, so Bao determined the machine solely wanted 4 buttons — turtles have fairly modest desires and wishes, anyway.

Except for the buttons themselves, that are normal arcade buttons, the important thing {hardware} parts for this challenge are an Arduino Nano, a generic sound module, and a speaker. That sound module shops audio clips on an SD card to play at any time when the Arduino makes a request. It additionally has a built-in amplifier, so it may well feed a sign on to the speaker. The sound clips comprise reasonable AI-generated voices: one for requesting meals, one for requesting pets, and one for expressing love.

The ultimate button orders pizza, which is the favourite meals of teenage turtles (mutant or in any other case). That works by enjoying a sound file that tells an Amazon Echo to have Alexa place an order at Dominos. 

Sadly, Lightning appears to have struggled to know the idea — perhaps Skinner was unsuitable, in spite of everything. However that’s in all probability a great factor for limiting the Bao’s Dominos price range.