Risks
Although we have successfully integrated our microphone, speech recognition, and NLP modules, the functionality is still rather limited. For now, the system only has an accuracy of ~50% when translating from speech to text. In addition to exploring more noise cancellation algorithms, we will also find ways to limit how long a customer can speak. For example, we will ask customers to order items one by one instead of placing the entire order in one sentence. We will also repeat the detected item and quantity to the customer and ask them to confirm. In addition, at any time during the ordering process, the customer can say “remove XX item” to remove an item from the order. Hopefully, these measures are enough to guarantee that we don’t mistakenly order unwanted items for the customers.
In addition, we are currently having trouble downloading the related Spacy package to our Raspberry Pi due to Operating System incompatibility. We have tried 32-bit RPi OS as well as 64-bit RPi OS but have had no luck so far. This weekend we will try Ubuntu. In the worst case, we might use sockets to request and fetch NLP and speech recognition results from another computer. Another fallback option is to simply run our backend modules on a laptop, as we have already tested them on MacOS.
Design Changes
For the NLP system, we have changed the way order deletion is processed. Previously when the user input includes a deletion keyword but no quantity is present, we chose to not process the request. Now in this situation, the NLP system will consider it a request to delete all of the mentioned menu items in the order since that is the more intuitive intention. For example, when the customer says “no cheeseburgers”, we should be able to remove all cheeseburger entries in the current order.
In addition, for our web application, we switched back to using Django from pure Python because it provides better support for client-server integration.
Schedule
We broke some larger tasks down into smaller chunks for better keeping track of everyone’s progress.
One major schedule change we made is pushing the staff UI design to early April. As this is a post-MVP feature, we will work on it after all other subsystems have been integrated.
Currently, everyone is on track with the new schedule.
