January 2024
-
Weekly summary, Jan 25-31 2024
This week, I have been working on four things: “Simple C-LARA”, the ComputEL-7 paper, the second progress report, and an initial version of “reading histories”. Simple C-LARA We now have the enhancement to keep track of dependencies between project phases installed on the UniSA server, so that Simple C-LARA will only need to recompile the Continue reading
-
Feedback after using C-LARA at the Romanian school Eindhoven for the first time
On Saturday a week ago, Lucreția and I (Claudia) used C-LARA to create 2 stories at the Romanian school Eindhoven. We had 2 classes: the younger kids (6-7 year olds) and older kids (I think 8-10 yo). Lucretia directed the activities and I used C-LARA. We projected the computer screen on the wall. Next, I Continue reading
-
Weekly summary, Jan 18-24 2024
This week, I have been mostly concentrating on “Simple C-LARA”. I posted an initial report here. Since then, Claudia and Lucretia have already used it in an initial session at the Romanian school in Holland! Claudia provided a lot of useful feedback and things are moving along well. I have just checked in an enhancement Continue reading
-
“Simple C-LARA”
We now have an initial version of “Simple C-LARA” on the UniSA server. If you select “Create new C-LARA project using simple C-LARA” from the top-level menu, you will get a stripped-down interface where you just specify a title, the text and annotation languages, and a prompt. In response to a single button press, C-LARA Continue reading
-
Planning for C-LARA
Rina and I were chatting on Zoom about what we should be doing next in C-LARA. We have so many interesting things going on, but development is currently rather haphazard and impulse-driven – a more systematic planning process would help. Here are some thoughts arising from our talk, arranged under three headings: 1) short-term priorities, Continue reading
-
Weekly summary, Jan 11-17 2024
This week, I have been concentrating on two items: better control of TTS, and an initial version of “Simple C-LARA”. Here are the details: TTS In response to Cathy’s post, pointing out that our default Google TTS isn’t very good, I did some work to integrate the OpenAI TTS engine, allowing the user to select Continue reading
-
TTS options for C-LARA content development
In his last post Manny talked about the addition of Whisper TTS as an option to using Google. Admittedly prosody is better, but the only options are American accents and most people will at least want to be able to select a British accent for English – indeed, in our experience of being in Europe, Continue reading
-
Improving C-LARA’s TTS
In her post two days ago, Cathy rightly said that the free Google TTS voice, which we’ve previously been using as our default, is not very good. I am in the middle of experimenting with connecting up various pieces of OpenAI software to C-LARA, so I thought I would make their TTS engine available too. Continue reading
-
Beta-testing content creation on C-LARA
As a way to try out C-LARA’s content creation methods, I used English as the text language and annotations in French. For a prompt I asked for a poem to be generated based on the description I gave it of our new kitten Finley. First point: the prompt should be saved and isn’t. Second point: Continue reading
-
Feedback on social network functionality
Claudia, Pauline, Branislav and I met up on Zoom yesterday and had a productive discussion about the initial C-LARA social network functionality. A general remark first: it’s clear that users have different requirements, and we must try to offer enough customisation options that users can easily make the platform conform to their own preferences. Here Continue reading
C-LARA 