OpenBEAT User guide

If you haven't already, download the latest development release: openbeat-dist-1.0-SNAPSHOT.zip (37 MB) since May 20, 2009.

The release is compiled with Java6 (-source and -target), requiring you to have Java6 installed. The distribution contains executables, one for Windows (a bat file) and one for Unix (a shell script) which prepare the classpath before launching the application. Two folders are also present in the zip file, one called openbeat which contains all OpenBEAT packaged modules and another called lib which contains all 3rd party library used by OpenBEAT or one of it's integrated modules. The size of the lib directory is considerable due to the nature of the dependencies (e.g. the speech synthesizer alone takes over 5MB).

Now extract the zip file to your preferred install location. Don't close the folder just yet, you need to move few files from the extracted folder into the BML Realizer folder, which is up next.

Note: BML Realizer needs to be downloaded separately.

Go to the BML Realizer website and download the latest version (OpenBEAT has been tested with BMLR_1.01) and extract to your preferred install location.

Now copy the files from OpenBEAT's PandaBMLR folder into the PandaBMLR folder from BML Realizer.

Note: Although OpenBEAT is platform independant, BML Realizer is not due to the dependency on SmartBody which only runs on Microsoft Windows.

By now, you should have installed both OpenBEAT and BML Realizer. The files you added to BML Realizer's folder contain an additional server and a which has been setup according to this guide's needs.

Here are the absolute minimum steps you need to take to get something going with visual realization of the behaviors:

1. Double click OpenBeatDemo.bat from the BML Realizer folder
2. Double click openbeat.bat from the OpenBEAT folder
3. Select OpenNlp as the NLP source
4. Select FreeTts as the timing source
5. Write Who ate the cake? into the input textarea
6. Press Compile and see the compiled output
7. Press Write output to send the compiled output to the BML Realizer window and listen to the speech and watch the behaviors synchronized accordingly

Don't feel like doing all the work to see the system in action? A picture is worth a thousand words and a video even more, so we created a screencast so you can see the system without having to download, install and run the beast.