Tzara - An Intellgent Personal Assistant

A highly customisable Personal Assistant name Tzara which helps in daily tasks written in Python 2.7.

Tasks:

1. Send emails

2. Search the internet

3. Open and close websites

4. Set reminders

5. Play movies and songs

6. Open documents and pdfs

7. Open any application

8. Update the system

9. Open the terminal

10. Converse - basic

11. Tell date and time

12. Shutdown the system

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

1. Debian or Ubuntu based system.

2. Python 2.7 - Installation instructions can be found here.

3. Pip

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-pip

You could also install Pip following these instructions.

Installation

Automatic Package Installation - Recommended (Method 1)

Open the terminal and input:

sudo pip install TzaraIPA

####Note: If your Internet connection is slow, the NLTK package will take several hours to download and install. Have patience!

Manual Package Installation (Method 2)

1. gtts

sudo pip install gTTS

2. mpg123

sudo apt-get install mpg123

3. NLTK package

sudo pip install -U nltk

Or follow these instructions.

4. Firefox

sudo apt-get install firefox

5. Audacious music Player

sudo apt-get install audacious

6. xdotool

sudo apt-get install xdotool

7. wmctrl

sudo apt-get install wmctrl

8. Guake dropdown terminal

sudo apt-get install guake

9. xdg-utils

sudo apt-get install xdg-utils

Post Package Installation

Note:

I have nearly automated the complete installation. Few details remain. But until I update the code, the manual post package installation described below is recommended.

1) Path setup:

After having downloaded all files, open EACH ONE and modify according to the instructions provided in the file.

For example, you may find:

f_reminder = open("/path/to/the/file/reminder.txt", "r+")

Replace "/path/to/the/file" with the actual pathname to the file called "reminder.txt".

Thus, in my system, this particular pathname was:

f_reminder = open("/media/suman/New Volume1/Artificial Intelligence/Personal Assistant/Text_files/reminder.txt", "r+")

This will ensure the Personal Assistant is customised only to you.

2) Email:

This is particular for Gmail accounts.

To send emails and read emails, you will need access to your Gmail account. But Gmail will block your email if you don't get a password, as it doesn't recognise the application.

To obtain a password for Tzara, follow these instructions.

Open check_email.sh in an editor.

Replace your_email_herr with your email-id. E.g. [email protected]

Replace your_password_here with the new password respectively. Note: the password is NOT your general email account password. It is specific to this application.

Replace /path/to/the/file/ with the pathname to the file inbox_detail.txt

Open the Terminal. Go to the directory containing the script check_email.sh

Make the script executable:

chmod u+x check_email.sh

3) Setting up .txt files:

You can modify the following .txt files to personalise Tzara further:

a) bye.txt - Add ways to say goodbye.

b) comn_sites.txt - Add sites you visit.

c) confirmations.txt - Add ways to confirm.

d) corporat.txt - List of corpora from where Tzara develops her sentences. Currently from Brown Corpus

e) email_id.txt - Add email-ids. E.g. [email protected] - Simply say: "Mail John", and Tzara will mail [email protected]

f) folder.txt - Add folder names and paths you frequently use. E.g. Suppose you go to /home/username/Documents often. Add Documents - /home/username/Documents to folder.txt, and then you can simply tell Tzara: Open folder documents, and she will open the correct folder.

g) greetings.txt - Add ways for Tzara to greet you.

Deployment

1. Open the guake terminal.

2. Input the following code:

python /path/to/the/file/main.py

Replace /path/to/the/file with the pathname to the file main.py. This file initialises Tzara.

Tzara will greet you with something like: Hi, my name is Tzara. How may I help you?

Go on and chat with your newfound friend.

3. To give commands, simply chat. For example, if you want Tzara to search for the word "cat" on the Internet, simply type something like: Hey Tzara, could you please search for cat. or Hi, could you please google cat. or simply google cat.

4. To end chat, type anything like:

Bye Tzara

or

Cya Tzara

or simply

bye

Authors

Suman Pal