Pareekshith’s Status Report for 3/7

The week before spring break, my group and I were focused heavily on completing the design report. Along with detailed audio subsystem explanations and certain design tradeoffs, I specifically took charge of the Design Requirements and Project Management portions of the report. I also ordered the Lavalier microphones that were critical for the audio component. Along with this, the team also met Dr. Dueck and her students in the 57584 course from the School of Music, and we had a great conversation about the potential role of our project in opera productions. We pored over different details, explored optimizations, and voiced our opinions about potential challenges that could arise through the course of the collaboration. I’m in charge of keeping the group updated with our team’s schedule, and we plan to meet weekly to show our latest progress, get feedback, and have actual testers of our product. I’m currently on track with my schedule, and next week, I hope to receive my microphones (along with our team’s parts) and start setting up our wearable node and its corresponding software. The only thing I’m a bit worried about with the School of Music collaboration is that I don’t know if Vosk, our offline ASR library, will be able to handle opera voices that aren’t spoken English. We’ll have to see if it’s viable for that, and if not, we’d either need to search for a model that is compatible or abandon the audio component specifically for opera (it would still work for stage plays though).