Zork 1 - Interactive Fiction on the Amazon Echo Dot

Hey Teen Gang!

I’ve made another vid of me playing Interactive Fiction on my Amazon Echo Dot. Trust me, this one is much better. The game runs much smoothlyer so there’s no bits of me arguing with the robot to get things done.

[rant]And again, regarding my first vid: the issues I encountered were totally the fault of the adaptation of Emily Short’s game and not the game itself. Galatea on any terp runs smooth. It was more of a humorous vid, really.[/rant]

Anyway, this new one is 7 minutes long and again, the game runs better. It’s a fan’s adaptation of Infocom’s Zork 1.

This entire sentence is the link!

I’m not familiar with the inner workings of the Echo. Can you say anything you want and it will do speech to text and then feed that text to an interpreter running… somewhere?

How does it work?

Just a comment from my own experiments in this sort of thing – I found that simply feeding the output of a voice recognizer into a terp is not enough to have a good time. A certain structural pre-processing is required for the incoming speech. The working code I had for this is most certainly gone forever, but was relatively simple.

That’s pretty much a good description for what it does. My partner and I sometimes find ourselves rewording things multiple times to get something done. In general, it’s very user-friendly. It definitely has to do with key words that the device is always listening for. This is the concern people have about these home assistant droids because they worry that Amazon and other Shadow Governments will be listening to them discuss the newest episode of Dancing With The Stars with their roommates.

There is a true account, however, of a couple who was contacted by a person on their contacts list saying their Alexa emailed him (you can link accounts to the device) and it sent him an audio file of a random piece of conversation the couple was having the day before, simply discussing some design ideas for their house. Alexa randomly decided to do that. Seriously, this happened. So now YouTube is rife with scare vids insisting you toss out these devices. My partner and I have had some funny things happen too, as she misunderstands things.

If you’ve seen Conan O’Brien’s “WikiBear” routine, it’s a great example of Alexa at times. And, my god, if you haven’t seen it, please click here and watch it.

The IF on it, so far, is hard for me to judge as I’m aware of what an IF terp parses and what it doesn’t, so I actually wonder how well a non-IFer would do with the games on it.

A thoroughly disappointing part 2 has been posted.

28 minutes of HOT ZORK ACTION have been uploaded!

Hey. I played 10 minutes of zarf’s “A Change In The Weather” (from 1995) on the Echo thingy if you wanted to check it out.

I finally found a “skill” for the Amazon Echo for Zork 2. Here’s 10 minutes of Zork 2.