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Play, download and edit the free video Frank the talking plant | Demo Video.

Can adding obsolescence to technology help the user experience? Does making us care for our devices mean we have more rich interactions with them? Can nature and high tech coexist? These are all questions I wanted to pose with my project Frank the talking plant. For this projects I wanted to explore what it would be like to make technology and nature be codependent in a household. Due to the rise of smart devices in the home such as Amazon echos, or google home talking to and interacting with technology like a human is more and more becoming the norm as AI and voice recognition software becomes more and more advanced. However I believe there is something deeply lacking in how we currently interact with and treat these objects, these objects are supposed to be treated as humans and members of the family however they are treated simply as tools there is no symbiosis between home device and human the relationship is purely for the benefit of the human. I feel like a root cause of this issue is the fact that these home devices are often perfect obelisks that stand like aliens in our home. They constantly obey and serve, requiring no care or attention they are simply tools. I wanted to tackle this issue with this project by designing a device which has some of these human imperfections such as a need for attention , caring and nourishment. I felt the best way to do this was to amalgamate this device with something from nature so that it would take on its natural imperfections. For this project I chose to use a House plant as it carry's these natural imperfections and also fits naturally within a household.

This Video is a demo video showing the functionality of the device and a simple example of how a relationship could exist between the device and human. For this example it is a very simple interaction only showing a simple change of mood and request to play a song, however I plan to further develop this project and hopefully conduct research into how the relationship between plant and human develops over time.

Hardware:
Raspberry Pi 3 B+,WM8960 Audio HAT,Adafruit HUZZAH32 – ESP32 Feather Board, Adafruit Moisture sensor, Speaker, iGOKU usb microphone,
Software:
Python3.5 script with SpeechRecognition, datetime, pyton-osc; Pure data Vanilla with comport extension

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