What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?
We still have worries about getting our components and pieces delivered on time, but we have now placed orders for most of our fundamentals. Because of this, we are feeling on track to be able to overcome this block. A new risk is in recent changes made to our design. We scrapped our original scoring idea and so we are now a little bit behind schedule again and working to get back to speed. As far as contingency, we have our most simplistic method of scoring ready to put in if it does not work.
Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?
We have adapted our scoring system from the original method. Our original method would execute the scoring primarily via hardware, subtracting the final speaker output from the original music track. We changed because due to advice from Professor Sullivan, our scoring would be inaccurate and not particularly useful. Even the natural differences in people’s voices would cause unpredictable differences in the output signal. There is only a small additional latency which will come from using software speech-to-text systems, but this will be the only change and will not largely affect our ability to provide a response in real time.