Pierre
Pierre is a low-resolution prototype of an interactive French-learning toy developed in November of 2020. The goal of this project was to train users how to identify and enunciate French fruit vocabulary in a fun and interactive way. I accessed the analog pins of an Arduino using the Raspberry Pi 4 to read the acidity values of different fruit. I then wrote a Python program to prompt the user to respond to questions vocalized in French through speakers with the English translation on a 16x2 LCD screen strapped to a 16 inch wooden nutcracker, who I named Pierre. I did this using a Speech Recognition package and the Google web speech API. The program validated which fruit the sensors were reading, and trained the user to learn how to say it in French. Due to my lack of knowledge at the time in training and testing data sets, I was not able to fully train users since you were only rewarded if you had perfect French pronunciation along with the accent. Anything less than that would result in a false pronunciation and you didn’t “succeed” in learning.