Vinny Bought Bot Colony. Now What?

This is the most I've laughed in a long while. You have the patience of a Saint, Vinny.

I love you Vinny. Never stop being you.

"Let's start a mission, Jimmy!" changes to "Jans left the mission jamming" THIS GAME IS AWESOME.

If you go to the link above

http://steamcommunity.com/games/263040/announcements/detail/190591878968722392

you can how the game works with a trained profile and you'll also see what the gameplay looks like. If someone plays it without a trained profile, or doesn't realize they have to hit Enter for the input to be evaluated - you get Vinny's experience. If people don't save their speech profile or don't read anything before they jump in and play, then yes, they'll have an experience like Vinny. By the way, you can also type.

theirsssssssssssdddaa

I think that's fair, although it seemed odd that even single words, pronounced as clearly as possible, weren't recognized. It's not like there was background noise getting in the way of using the boom. Out of curiosity, how much training is needed to have the experience in the video you linked? I mean, Vinny went through a good 15-20 minutes of it. Do you have to repeat the training 2-3 times for it to work properly? Also, even if the voice recognition is perfect, the lack of contextual awareness is something I hope you guys are working to fix (like when Vinny said "walk forward" twice, then said "more" and it wasn't recognized).

I respect what you guys are doing, but when there is voice recognition software out there (Siri, Google Voice, etc) that accurately recognizes voice and context with zero training, I can completely see why someone would become frustrated with this game, as they would expect the voice recognition to be as a good as tech that has been existing for years. Anyways, good luck!

EDIT: I should also mention that, even when vinny's commands are recognized, or when he types commands, the robot often still doesn't understand, or performs an action totally different to what was commanded.

Interesting.

All right Vinny. Back in your chair. We're doing this again.

@mrsmiley said:

I think the point is that Vinny accidentally didn't save ANY of his training. Also they're not using their own speech recognition technology, they're using Microsoft's (or Dragon, if you have that installed).

I second that notion!

"HAVE SEX"

I love it when Philips talks to the NPCs like he knows them! Vinny is the man!!! Cant wait to intern at VinCo one of these days

SO THIS WAS PRETTY MUCH THE BEST THING EVER

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

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.

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

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.

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.

This was amazing.

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!

wow... that's pretty painful to watch

Did you mean?

Nice QL, Andrew.

Voice commands + VinnyAndrew Philips = great stuff :D

WHY WOULDNT HE CLICK FURTHER TO THE FUCKING RIGHT

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

Wow. This was great.

"This is not a game"

It's Philips.

Oh my gosh. Hilarious.

@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.

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

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.

Hilarious, wish jeff was on this too.

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

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

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

Three things:

1) Butt Colony

2) DAT BEARD

3)Lovelovelove Vinny

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

my god didn't see me

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

Why do you do this to yourself Vinny?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I sure hope Vinny closed the book on Bot Colony

@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.

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

@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."