Vinny Bought Bot Colony. Now What?

I laughed so much! Thanks!

This was one of the greatest premium videos of all time. Holy shit I'm dying of laughter right now.

Did he do all that training and then not select it as his voice profile?

Jimmy will haunt Vinny forever.

Because if you analyse the actual sounds coming from us when talking, it's pretty damn hard to determine what words we are saying. In no way the sounds match 1 to 1 to the words as they are written.

So you get dozens of ambiguities in each sentence. To make a good guess as to whatis being said, you need to have an understanding of the messed up way humans use grammar and you need to have knowledge of the entire world to understand in what context something is being said in..

And that's just damn hard. Language is one of those very human things that's hard to separate and model in computer software without dragging in the whole rest of the brain and the years of experience we had to learn it.

So after reading a few things...

- There's no other noise in the room except Vinny. We can clearly hear him through the mic he's using with no trouble, doesn't matter that it's a boom mic.

- I don't have to make a 'voice profile' for my phone. That I would have to for 30 minutes to an hour to "play" a game like this is insanity. Furthermore, when I talk to my phone, it understands the difference between "abort" and "aborts". And the few times it is off, I never get results like "A New York pass". "Shut" seemed like another problem, and when he tried "close the drawer", Jimmy let him know that he was already in "close" proximity. Infuriating.

- When teaching Jimmy a new command, Jimmy insists you teach him based on commands he already knows, one step at a time. Jimmy fucked up simple commands already, there is no reason to assume he would be smart enough to understand a multistep process of picking up the grinders and putting them down in each other's places.

- "You can type things too!"... Um, well, yes, but the game's gimmick, and what sets it apart, as well as what you see in the videos, is the whole voice thing. Is someone going to pay $15 to play a game where you indirectly control a being, having them do mundane things, by typing in things like "pick up the vase"? What is this game without voice, really?

- The whole pepper grinder incident... even though he didn't say "Switch the salt and pepper", if one wanted to do it the way he did, it's as if the space to the right of the coffee maker does not exist. The right of the coffee maker is instead somehow past where the counter elbows to the left of the coffee maker. Even the top of the coffee maker exists, just not the space where Vinny is clicking. That's something wrong with the game itself.

I laughed so fucking hard!

I laughed so fucking hard!

Not the ants!!

haha damn that Jimmy

Speech recognition, still the weakest thing around. Not even a good one gets things right like Siri for example. Why can't they ever make those programs listen to WHAT we say instead of something like it? We might never know... oh, and I'm betting that was about the same as the Siri on phones, meaning a terrible one!

They should REALLY test their games more and make it more possible to say simple things. This game didn't seem to be tested at all...

Now I kind of wonder if there is a game which CAN do this without much fail.

so funny

Jimmy: "That's the guy who sidelined Jimmy."

@botcolony:

I really don't think Vinny is intentionally being malicious towards your game. I know you might not see it this way right now, but try to look at it from this perspective: a few thousand people who had probably never heard of Bot Colony before yesterday are now talking about Bot Colony.

"The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

oh my god i can't stop laughing am i going to die?

@dewar: Actually, he does understand swap the salt with the pepper.

To look at the bright side, Vinny did teach a new command (dance as 'turn, turn, walk, jump').

There was a feeling of anguish and not getting through, and the longer it went, the more it hit home. Remember the game is an Alpha version in Early Access. Processing things out of context and clarifying them needs to be a lot stronger for a good game experience.

Gameplay wise Vinny could have done a few things better:

- He started using keyboard correction only towards the end (when speech to text had actually improved).

- Vinny only stumbled on the Help menu towards the end. It would have been more useful to train speech to text on how to play the game, but unfortunately the novel introduction was offered as a choice and he picked that. The Bot Colony book should only be offered for supplemental speech training.

- Saying things twice helps people, but not machines.

- He did get an answer to "What are your commands?", but did not make use of the information.

- He didn't realize training was over, and kept repeating 'the toy giraffe' without saying what to do with it.

- Asking the robot to put stuff in his ass is funny, but the best we could have done is to say something clinical like 'own body cannot be the target of a manipulation command'. Not sure how much that would improve the experience.

I sure hope Vinny closed the book on Bot Colony

This is the best. You're the best Vinny.

Hmm, so I was right, he should have asked the robot to switch the salt and pepper. I guess there's no reason to assume that the robot would have been able to understand a sentence with multiple subjects. Maybe a demonstration of a couple of more complicated commands would have been handy.

Right. Nine-hundred and eleven is a joke in my town.

This is easily one of the funniest things they've ever done. Bravo Vinny.

Shouldn't we call this segment, 'Story Time with Vinny'. Fantastic!!!

I have never understood the "video glitch" aesthetic. I've never seen huge artifact cubes, or someone's face go upside down real fast before correcting itself... even on the worst Skype conversations.

Why do you do this to yourself Vinny?

Fantastic, one of top 10 of Vinny QL ever...

my god didn't see me

So this is Lifeline, but without the voice of Ultra-Babe Elisha Cuthbert™? I'M OUT!

Three things:

1) Butt Colony

2) DAT BEARD

3)Lovelovelove Vinny

Great video Vinny. My fellow employees perform similarly to Jimmy the robot a lot of the time.

Bot Colony is not just about commands. Take a look at this

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ginpub8ztnmhfae/Bot%20Colony%20Robot%20Visual%20Memories.mp4

Hilarious, wish jeff was on this too.

Yeah, regardless of what you think of the gameplay it's unfair to pin the voice recognition experience of a guy using a third party program via boom mic with no saved voice profile on the game... especially when you can type commands.

That said the whole natural speech interface reminds me to some extent of the vaguely frustrating but nonetheless intriguing Starship Titanic. Of course that game is many years old and outside of 'programming' commands this doesn't seem to advance the natural language command concept too far.

The massive elephant in the room with this stuff is that a parser cannot reinterpret mistakes, infer intent or learn unknown terms based on conversational context which makes them enormously difficult to interact with. Even the most advanced language parsers (those used in the modern form of Turing test) are severely limited in inference capabilities and are only superior in their word and sentence tree libraries.

Agreed on the Boom Mic comments. May not have been the right kind of mic for that, however the whole agonizing portion of "put the pepper grinder down" would have driven me nuts with or without good voice recognition.

Looks like a fun game but way too detailed for my tastes

@darkest4: Nah, there's something glorious about Vinny alone, screaming at a computer in a tiny room in the TV Guide office. I was kind of hoping that a security guard would come after getting a report that there was a crazed homeless man in the building.

Oh my gosh. Hilarious.

It's Philips.

"This is not a game"

Wow. This was great.

I'm getting a weird Phantom 2040 vibe from this...

WHY WOULDNT HE CLICK FURTHER TO THE FUCKING RIGHT

Voice commands + VinnyAndrew Philips = great stuff :D

Did you mean?

Nice QL, Andrew.

wow... that's pretty painful to watch

What an excellent excellent video, i was in tears. I am sure the game can perform better, but this way it was perfectly orchestrated comedy!

This was amazing.

So pumped!

As funny as that text Vinny was reading seemed, it addresses a very real future issue. Robots taking over manual jobs will bring about MASSIVE inequality, think worse than Brasil or Russia today, with wealth concentrated at the hands of corporations that own the robots. The only solution seems to be government taking initiative in the field of robot manual labor. Might be a bit socialist, but it's probably best.

seriously biggest thing i'll miss is vinny not being on a podcast now. too bad i feel like vinny on the am show would just strain patrick a bit as he's then the only one not there then.

I suggest this gets turned into a regular thing - Bot Colony Endurance Run anyone?

I don't believe so. He showed it at the start and had it on hand as a backup plan, but never put it on because the boom mic was working ("working" used loosely here) as an input mic.

@billyok: isn't he using the logitec headphones mic he mentioned at the start???