A Companion Robotic That Would possibly Need to Harm You

For the uninitiated, GLaDOS, the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Working System, is an iconic character from the critically acclaimed online game sequence Portal, developed by Valve. Initially launched because the central antagonist within the authentic Portal recreation launched in 2007, GLaDOS shortly turned one in every of gaming’s most memorable and chilling villains. Created by Aperture Science, she serves because the controlling intelligence behind the Aperture Science Enrichment Middle, the place gamers navigate a sequence of take a look at chambers armed solely with a portal gun.

What makes GLaDOS significantly intriguing is her advanced character, which blends a chilly, calculating demeanor with darkish humor and occasional hints of vulnerability. Voiced with sinister allure, GLaDOS’s dialogue is laced with sarcasm and veiled threats, making her interactions with the participant each unnerving and charming. Her distinct robotic voice and memorable traces, resembling “The cake is a lie,” have change into synonymous with the Portal franchise.

A villainous robotic like GLaDOS may appear to be an odd alternative for a companion, however I suppose isolation could make an individual do some unusual issues. That was the case for {hardware} hacker and YouTuber Dave Niewinski, anyway, who got here down with COVID just lately and needed to maintain to himself for some time. Throughout that point, he determined to construct a sensible clone of GLaDOS to maintain him firm. And we’re glad he did — the interactive animatronic robotic is powered by AI to make it an excellent companion, even when it could be secretly bent on his destruction.

There are various items to a undertaking like this, however getting the voice proper is maybe crucial think about making a convincing duplicate of GLaDOS. Niewinski did a fast survey of pre-built voice mills that search to copy GLaDOS’s voice, however discovered all of them to be missing, so a customized answer was wanted. He discovered that Valve has a lot of audio clips of GLaDOS talking on their web site, which made it straightforward to gather a dataset of over an hour in size.

This dataset was leveraged to coach a pair of machine studying fashions. The primary is a spectrogram generator referred to as Fastpitch, which was fine-tuned to sound extra like GLaDOS’s voice. The outcomes have been shut, however not fairly proper, so one other mannequin, referred to as a vocoder, was additionally educated to sound just like the goal voice and additional course of the outcomes. This mix of fashions produced a fairly convincing GLaDOS voice.

These networks have been then loaded into NVIDIA’s Riva AI software program improvement equipment to make them straightforward to entry over a community. As an additional advantage, Riva additionally provided speech-to-text capabilities that allowed individuals to additionally speak to the robotic. The textual content generated by this pipeline is fed right into a locally-running giant language mannequin, and the outcomes it produces are then fed into the GLaDOS voice generator for a spoken response.

The fashions all ran domestically on a Forge Provider Board for the highly effective but small NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin laptop module. This little beast of a pc even had sufficient processing energy left over to regulate a Unitree Z1 robotic arm that served as the bottom of the robotic. The rest of GLaDOS’s physique consisted of 3D-printed elements and a few RGB LEDs. As a of entirety, to present the robotic extra character, a Stereolabs ZED 2i depth digital camera was included within the construct. This fed information into an individual monitoring algorithm (sure, additionally operating on the Jetson AGX Orin), and moved the Z1 robotic arm to maintain GLaDOS “trying” on the individual it was speaking to.