Alexa-Microservice

Runs a local server hosting four microservices for: Text to Speech, Speech to Text, Text Question to Text Answer, Spoken Question to Spoken Answer.

Content

• How To Run?
  • Requirements
• Project Guide

How To Run?

• See Requirements!

1. Open two terminals and follow step 2 for both of them
2. Navigate to the alexa-microservice directory containing alexa-microservice.go (and the run-server scripts)
3. In the first terminal use command: bash run-server.sh for Linux, or .\run-server.ps1 for Windows Powershell
4. In the second terminal KEEP alexa-microservice as the root directory, and from here run the test scripts
   • Example: bash test/<name-test>.sh

Issues

• If step 3 failed, ensure the correct permissions for all files within the alexa-microservice directory are granted
• base64 can vary across Linux versions, which can cause incompatable whitespace being encoded . . .
  • For Ubuntu: base64 -i should work fine
  • If this command fails, use: base64 -w 0 -i
  • Finally if both fail, the input is most likely incorrect

Requirements

• gorilla mux must be install, use command: go get -u github.com/gorilla/mux
• Two keys must be provided for WolframAlpha and Microsoft Cognitive Services inside the config.json file
  • If you do not have keys for these services they can be obtained via their respective sites

Project Guide

All four microservices expect a specific JSON object as input.

• alpha.go and tts.go require a JsonText object which contains a text query
  • Example: {"text": "What is the melting point of silver?"}
• stt.go and alexa.go require a JsonSpeech object which contains a spoken query as a base64 encoded .wav (WAVE) file
  • Example: {"speech": "<.wav>(base64)"}

Directories
bin/	Hosts the exeutable and any files it needs
config/	Contains config.go a handler for config.json which stores vital information for all the microservices to run
res/	Holds various resource files for the user to utilise or to be used as a file output dump during the programs debug method
services/	Package directory storing the microservices used in the program
test/	Stores all the test scripts with both bash and powershell variants

Root Files
alexa-microservice.go	The main program, runs several go routines to create multiple listerner threads for the microservices
go.mod	Hosts the alexa-microservice module requirements
run-server.sh	Script to build and run the alexa-microservice server (for Bash)
run-server.ps1	Windows Powershell variant of run-server.sh

Services
alpha.go	Microservice which provides computational knowledge via communication with WolframAlpha's API
stt.go	Microservice which computes Speech to Text using Microsoft Cognitive Services (MCS)
tts.go	Microservice which computes Text to Speech using Microsoft Cognitive Services (MCS)
alexa.go	Microservice which commits several queries to convert a spoken question to a spoken answer
utils.go	Hosts utility functions, variables, & structs used in data representation

Debug: Write Resource to File
In services/utils.go if debugWriteResourceToFile is set to true,
files managed by each microservice will be written to the resource directory (/res)