Making Skill Display Cards Identical in SUSI.AI Skill CMS

SUSI.AI Skill CMS shows all the skills of SUSI.AI. The cards used to display all the skills follow flexbox structure and adjust their height according to content. This lead to cards of different sizes and this needed to be fixed. This needed to fix as the cards looked like this:

The cards display following things:

  • Image related to skill
  • An example query related to skill in double quotes
  • Name of skill
  • Short description of skill

Now to get all these, we make an ajax call to the following endpoint:

http://api.susi.ai/cms/getSkillList.json?model='+ this.state.modelValue + '&group=' + this.state.groupValue + '&language=' + this.state.languageValue

Explanation:

  • this.state.modelValue: This is the model of the skill, stored in state of component
  • this.state.groupValue: This represents the group to which skill belongs to. For example Knowledge, Communication, Music, and Audio, etc.
  • this.state.languageValue: This represents the ISO language code of language in which skill is defined

Now the response is in JSONP format and it looks like:

Now we parse the response to get the information needed and return the following Card(Material UI Component):

<Link key={el}
     to={{
        pathname: '/' + self.state.groupValue + '/' + el + '/' + self.state.languageValue,
            state: {
                        url: url,
                        element: el,
                        name: el,
                        modelValue: self.state.modelValue,
                        groupValue: self.state.groupValue,
                        languageValue: self.state.languageValue,
                       }
           }}>
           <Card style={styles.row} key={el}>
                <div style={styles.right} key={el}>
                       {image ? <div style={styles.imageContainer}>
                        <img alt={skill_name}
                          src={image}
                          style={styles.image} />
                          </div> :
                         <CircleImage name={el} size='48' />}
                             <div style={styles.titleStyle}>{examples}</div>
                             </div>
                             <div style={styles.details}>
                                 <h3 style={styles.name}>{skill_name}</h3>
                                 <p style={styles.description}>{description}</p>
                             </div>
         </Card>
</Link>

Now the information that leads to non-uniformity in these cards is the skill description. Now to solve this we decided to put a certain limit to the description length and if that limit is crossed, then we will show the following dots: “”. The height and width of the cards were fixed according to screen size and we modified the description as follows:

if (skill.descriptions) {
      if (skill.descriptions.length > 120) {
          description = skill.descriptions.substring(0, 119) + '...';
      }
      else {
          description = skill.descriptions;
      }
}

This way no content was being cut and all the skill cards looks identical:

Resources:

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Implementing Author’s Skill Page in SUSI.AI CMS

SUSI.AI Skill CMS is improving every day and we keep adding new features to it. Recently a feature was added to display all the skills by an author. This feature only showed the list of skills. The user might want to visit the skill page to see the description so we linked the skills on the list to skill page. The list looked like this:

We need to link skill name and image to respective skill page. Now since this is react based app, we do not have different URL for different skills due to SPA. The description, images and other relevant details of skills were being passed as props. We needed to have routes through which we can directly access the skill. This was done by implementing child routes for Skill CMS. Earlier the description, images, and other relevant data was being passed as props from the BrowseSkill component, but now we need to derive this from the URL:

let baseUrl = 'http://api.susi.ai/cms/getSkillMetadata.json';           
let modelValue = "general";
this.name = this.props.location.pathname.split('/')[2];
this.groupValue = this.props.location.pathname.split('/')[1];
this.languageValue = this.props.location.pathname.split('/')[3];
url = baseUrl + '?model=' + modelValue + '&group=' + this.groupValue +        '&language=' + this.languageValue + '&skill=' + this.name;

We now make an ajax call to this URL for fetching the data:

$.ajax({
               url: url,
               jsonpCallback: 'pc',
               dataType: 'jsonp',
               jsonp: 'callback',
               crossDomain: true,
               success: function (data) {
                   self.updateData(data.skill_metadata)
               }
           });

This updates the skill page with the description, image, author and other relevant details of the skills. Now all left to do is link the skills on the list to their respective links. This is done by following code:

We define skillURL as:

let skillURL = 'http://skills.susi.ai/' + parse[6] + '/' + parse[8].split('.')[0] + '/' + parse[7];

Here parse is an array which contains model, group and ISO language code of the skill. We updated the Image and text component as:

<a
   href={skillURL} >
   <Img
     style={imageStyle}
     src={[
           image1,
           image2
          ]}
     unloader={<CircleImage name={name} size="40"/>}
                          />
</a>
<a
   href={skillURL}
   className="effect-underline" >
    {name}
</a>

Now after proper styling, we had the following looking skill list by author:

Resources

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Link Preview Service from SUSI Server

 SUSI Webchat, SUSI Android app, SUSI iOS app are various SUSI clients which depend on response from SUSI Server. The most common response of SUSI Server is in form of links. Clients usually need to show the preview of the links to the user. This preview may include featured image, description and the title of the link.  Clients show this information by using various 3rd party APIs and libraries. We planned to create an API endpoint for this on SUSI Server to give the preview of the link. This service is called LinkPreviewService.
String url = post.get("url", "");
        if(url==null || url.isEmpty()){
            jsonObject.put("message","URL Not given");
            jsonObject.put("accepted",false);
            return new ServiceResponse(jsonObject);
        }

This API Endpoint accept only 1 get parameter which is the URL whose preview is to be shown.

Here we also check if no parameter or wrong URL parameter was sent. If that was the the case then we return an error message to the user.

 SourceContent sourceContent =     TextCrawler.scrape(url,3);
        if (sourceContent.getImages() != null) jsonObject.put("image", sourceContent.getImages().get(0));
        if (sourceContent.getDescription() != null) jsonObject.put("descriptionShort", sourceContent.getDescription());
        if(sourceContent.getTitle()!=null)jsonObject.put("title", sourceContent.getTitle());
        jsonObject.put("accepted",true);
        return new ServiceResponse(jsonObject);
    }

The TextCrawler function accept two parameters. One is the url of the website which is to be scraped for the preview data and the other is depth. To get the images, description and title there are methods built in. Here we just call those methods and set them in our JSON Object.

 private String htmlDecode(String content) {
        return Jsoup.parse(content).text();
    }

Text Crawler is based on Jsoup. Jsoup is a java library that is used to scrape HTML pages.

To get anything from Jsoup we need to decode the content of HTML to Text.

public List<String> getImages(Document document, int imageQuantity) {
        Elements media = document.select("[src]");
        while(var5.hasNext()) {
            Element srcElement = (Element)var5.next();
            if(srcElement.tagName().equals("img")) {
                ((List)matches).add(srcElement.attr("abs:src"));
            }
        }

 The getImages method takes the HTML document from the JSoup and find the image tags in that. We have given the imageQuantity parameter in the function, so accordingly it returns the src attribute of the first n images it find.

This API Endpoint can be seen working on

http://127.0.0.1:4000/susi/linkPreview.json?url=<ANY URL>

A real working example of this endpoint would be http://api.susi.ai/susi/linkPreview.json?url=https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/23/dear-tech-dudes-stop-being-such-idiots-about-women/

Resources:

Web Crawlers: https://www.promptcloud.com/data-scraping-vs-data-crawling/

JSoup: https://jsoup.org/

JSoup Api Docs: https://jsoup.org/apidocs/

Parsing HTML with JSoup: http://www.baeldung.com/java-with-jsoup

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Implementing Text To Speech Settings in SUSI WebChat

SUSI Web Chat has Text to Speech (TTS) Feature where it gives voice replies for user queries. The Text to Speech functionality was added using Speech Synthesis Feature of the Web Speech API. The Text to Speech Settings were added to customise the speech output by controlling features like :

  1. Language
  2. Rate
  3. Pitch

Let us visit SUSI Web Chat and try it out.

First, ensure that the settings have SpeechOutput or SpeechOutputAlways enabled. Then click on the Mic button and ask a query. SUSI responds to your query with a voice reply.

To control the Speech Output, visit Text To Speech Settings in the /settings route.

First, let us look at the language settings. The drop down list for Language is populated when the app is initialised. speechSynthesis.onvoiceschanged function is triggered when the app loads initially. There we call speechSynthesis.getVoices() to get the voice list of all the languages currently supported by that particular browser. We store this in MessageStore using ActionTypes.INIT_TTS_VOICES action type.

window.speechSynthesis.onvoiceschanged = function () {
  if (!MessageStore.getTTSInitStatus()) {
    var speechSynthesisVoices = speechSynthesis.getVoices();
    Actions.getTTSLangText(speechSynthesisVoices);
    Actions.initialiseTTSVoices(speechSynthesisVoices);
  }
};

We also get the translated text for every language present in the voice list for the text – `This is an example of speech synthesis` using google translate API. This is called initially for all the languages and is stored as translatedText attribute in the voice list for each element. This is later used when the user wants to listen to an example of speech output for a selected language, rate and pitch.

https://translate.googleapis.com/translate_a/single?client=gtx&sl=en-US&tl=TARGET_LANGUAGE_CODE&dt=t&q=TEXT_TO_BE_TRANSLATED

When the user visits the Text To Speech Settings, then the voice list stored in the MessageStore is retrieved and the drop down menu for Language is populated. The default language is fetched from UserPreferencesStore and the default language is accordingly highlighted in the dropdown. The list is parsed and populated as a drop down using populateVoiceList() function.

let voiceMenu = voices.map((voice,index) => {
  if(voice.translatedText === null){
    voice.translatedText = this.speechSynthesisExample;
  }
  langCodes.push(voice.lang);
  return(
    <MenuItem value={voice.lang}
              key={index}
              primaryText={voice.name+' ('+voice.lang+')'} />
  );
});

The language selected using this dropdown is only used as the language for the speech output when the server doesn’t specify the language in its response and the browser language is undefined. We then create sliders using Material UI for adjusting speech rate and pitch.

<h4 style={{'marginBottom':'0px'}}><Translate text="Speech Rate"/></h4>
<Slider
  min={0.5}
  max={2}
  value={this.state.rate}
  onChange={this.handleRate} />

The range for the sliders is :

  • Rate : 0.5 – 2
  • Pitch : 0 – 2

The default value for both rate and pitch is 1. We create a controlled slider saving the values in state and using onChange function to record change in values. The Reset buttons can be used to reset the rate and pitch values respectively to their default values. Once the language, rate and pitch values have been selected we can click on `Play a short demonstration of speech synthesis`  to listen to a voice reply with the chosen settings.

{ this.state.playExample &&
  (
    <VoicePlayer
       play={this.state.play}
       text={voiceOutput.voiceText}
       rate={this.state.rate}
       pitch={this.state.pitch}
       lang={this.state.ttsLanguage}
       onStart={this.onStart}
       onEnd={this.onEnd}
    />
  )
}

We use the VoicePlayer by passing the required props to get the speech output. onStart and onEnd functions are triggered at the beginning and ending of the speech synthesis and are used to control the state from the parent component. Chosen language, rate, pitch and translated text are passed as props to VoicePlayer which creates a new SpeechSynthesisUtterance() with the passed props and plays the speech output.

On saving these settings and then using the Mic button to get voice replies we see that the voice output is controlled according to the selected settings.

Finally, we have to store the selected settings on the server and ensure that these are pulled when the app is initialized. The format in which these settings are stored in the server is :

Speech Rate

- Used to control rate of speech output.
- SETTING_NAME :  `speechRate`
- SETTING_VALUE : `0.5 - 2`
- DEFAULT_VALUE : `1`
 
Speech Pitch

- Used to control pitch of speech output.
- SETTING_NAME :  `speechPitch`
- SETTING_VALUE : `0 - 2`
- DEFAULT_VALUE : `1`
 
TTS Language

- Used to set the language for Text-To-Speech used when the response from server doesnt specify language and the browser language is also undefined.
- SETTING_NAME :  `ttsLanguage`
- SETTING_VALUE : `Language Code (string)`
- DEFAULT_VALUE : `en-US`

This is how the Text To Speech Settings were implemented in SUSI Web Chat. The complete code can be found at SUSI Web Chat Repository.

PS: To test whether your browser supports Text To Speech, open your browser console and try the following :

  • var msg = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance(‘Hello World’);
  • window.speechSynthesis.speak(msg)

If you get a speech output then the Web API Speech Synthesis is supported by your browser and Text To Speech features of SUSI Web Chat will work. The Web Speech API has support for all latest Chrome browsers as mentioned in the Web Speech API Mozilla docs.However there are few bugs with some Chromium versions please check out more on how to fix them locally here in this link.

Resources:

 

 

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Deleting SUSI Skills from Server

SUSI Skill CMS is a web application to create and edit skills. In this blog post I will be covering how we made the skill deleting feature in Skill CMS from the SUSI Server.
The deletion of skill was to be made in such a way that user can click a button to delete the skill. As soon as they click the delete button the skill is deleted it is removed from the directory of SUSI Skills. But admins have an option to recover the deleted skill before completion of 30 days of deleting the skill.

First we will accept all the request parameters from the GET request.

        String model_name = call.get("model", "general");
        String group_name = call.get("group", "Knowledge");
        String language_name = call.get("language", "en");
        String skill_name = call.get("skill", "wikipedia");

In this we get the model name, category, language name, skill name and the commit ID. The above 4 parameters are used to make a file path that is used to find the location of the skill in the Susi Skill Data repository.

 if(!DAO.deleted_skill_dir.exists()){
            DAO.deleted_skill_dir.mkdirs();
   }

We need to move the skill to a directory called deleted_skills_dir. So we check if the directory exists or not. If it not exists then we create a directory for the deleted skills.

  if (skill.exists()) {
   File file = new File(DAO.deleted_skill_dir.getPath()+path);
   file.getParentFile().mkdirs();
   if(skill.renameTo(file)){
   Boolean changed =  new File(DAO.deleted_skill_dir.getPath()+path).setLastModified(System.currentTimeMillis());
     }

This is the part where the real deletion happens. We get the path of the skill and rename that to a new path which is in the directory of deleted skills.

Also here change the last modified time of the skill as the current time. This time is used to check if the skill deleted is older than 30 days or not.

    try (Git git = DAO.getGit()) {
                DAO.pushCommit(git, "Deleted " + skill_name, rights.getIdentity().isEmail() ? rights.getIdentity().getName() : "anonymous@");
                json.put("accepted", true);
                json.put("message", "Deleted " + skill_name);
            } catch (IOException | GitAPIException e) {

Finally we add the changes to Git. DAO.pushCommit pushes to commit to the Susi Skill Data repository. If the user is logged in we get the email of the user and set that email as the commit author. Else we set the username “anonymous@”.

Then in the caretaker class there is a method deleteOldFiles that checks for all the files whose last modified time was older than 30 days. If there is any file whose last modified time was older than 30 days then it quietly delete the files.

public void deleteOldFiles() {
     Collection<File> filesToDelete = FileUtils.listFiles(new         File(DAO.deleted_skill_dir.getPath()),
     new 
(DateTime.now().withTimeAtStartOfDay().minusDays(30).toDate()),
            TrueFileFilter.TRUE);    // include sub dirs
        for (File file : filesToDelete) {
               boolean success = FileUtils.deleteQuietly(file);
            if (!success) {
                System.out.print("Deleted skill older than 30 days.");
            }
      }
}

To test this API endpoint, we need to call http://localhost:4000/cms/deleteSkill.txt?model=general&group=Knowledge&language=en&skill=<skill_name>

Resources

JGit Documentation: https://eclipse.org/jgit/documentation/

Commons IO: https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-io/

Age Filter: https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-io/javadocs/api-1.4/org/apache/commons/io/filefilter/AgeFileFilter.html

JGit User Guide: http://wiki.eclipse.org/JGit/User_Guide

JGit Repository access: http://www.codeaffine.com/2014/09/22/access-git-repository-with-jgit/

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Getting SUSI Skill at a Commit ID

Susi Skill CMS is a web app to edit and create new skills. We use Git for storing different versions of Susi Skills. So what if we want to roll back to a previous version of the skill? To implement this feature in Susi Skill CMS, we needed an API endpoint which accepts the name of the skill and the commit ID and returns the file at that commit ID.

In this blog post I will tell about making an API endpoint which works similar to git show.

First we will accept all the request parameters from the GET request.

        String model_name = call.get("model", "general");
        String group_name = call.get("group", "Knowledge");
        String language_name = call.get("language", "en");
        String skill_name = call.get("skill", "wikipedia");
        String commitID  = call.get("commitID", null);

In this we get the model name, category, language name, skill name and the commit ID. The above 4 parameters are used to make a file path that is used to find the location of the skill in the Susi Skill Data repository.

This servlet need CommitID to work and if commit ID is not given in the request parameters then we send an error message saying that the commit id is null and stop the servlet execution.

    Repository repository = DAO.getRepository();
    ObjectId CommitIdObject = repository.resolve(commitID);

Then we get the git repository of the skill from the DAO and initialize the repository object.

From the commitID that we got in the request parameters we create a CommitIdObject.

   (RevWalk revWalk = new RevWalk(repository)) {
   RevCommit commit = revWalk.parseCommit(CommitIdObject);
   RevTree tree = commit.getTree();


Now using commit’s tree, we will find the find the path and get the tree of the commit.

From the TreeWalk in the repository we will set a filter to find a file. This searches recursively for the files inside all the folders.

                revWalk = new RevWalk(repository)) {
                try (TreeWalk treeWalk = new TreeWalk(repository)) {
                    treeWalk.addTree(tree);
                    treeWalk.setRecursive(true);
                    treeWalk.setFilter(PathFilter.create(path));
                    if (!treeWalk.next()) {
                        throw new IllegalStateException("Did not find expected file");
                    }

If the TreeWalk reaches to an end and does not find the specified skill path then it returns anIllegal State Exception with an message saying did not found the file on that commit ID.

       ObjectId objectId = treeWalk.getObjectId(0);
       ObjectLoader loader = repository.open(objectId);
       OutputStream output = new OutputStream();
       loader.copyTo(output);

And then one can the loader to read the file. From the treeWalk we get the object and create an output stream to copy the file content in it. After that we create the JSON and put the OutputStream object as as String in it.

       json.put("file",output);

This Servlet can be seen working api.susi.ai: http://api.susi.ai/cms/getFileAtCommitID.json?model=general&group=knowledge&language=en&skill=bitcoin&commitID=214791f55c19f24d7744364495541b685539a4ee

Resources

JGit Documentation: https://eclipse.org/jgit/documentation/

JGit User Guide: http://wiki.eclipse.org/JGit/User_Guide

JGit Repository access: http://www.codeaffine.com/2014/09/22/access-git-repository-with-jgit/

JGit Github: https://github.com/eclipse/jgit

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