Making SCILAB ‘Smarter’

Ever since I was introduced to Scilab I have been fascinated by it’s versatility and ease of use. It’s power never ceases to surprise me.
Which is why I like to play around with the vast number of functions that it has to offer. The best part about Scilab is that it is Open-Source and hence people like me or you can contribute to it and add even more functionalities to it and hence make it even more powerful.

I started making modules for Scilab a few weeks ago at the advice of my teacher, and I have developed quite a few of those now. The purpose of these modules/toolboxes is to add features that weren’t there already.

Yesterday, as I was going through the Wolfram Alpha Website I noticed that the website offers features for a vast areas of study. You can use it to solve a physics/ chemistry/biology problems with the pre-built algorithms available there.

This is when it struck me, what if I do the same thing with Scilab. That is, I want to make modules for a lot of subjects like Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc which would offer pre-built functions for a variety of problems.

That way Scilab can be adopted as a tool of choice by more and more students and not just Physics or Math students.

Also, I started wondering if I could make Scilab ‘smart’ as in add some functions that would imitate a digital assistant.
For example: You could ask Scilab the meaning of a word or the weather or may be just a joke or a riddle.

So I have started working on that and as a first step towards making Scilabsmart‘, I have developed a module that brings the functionality of an English Dictionary into the Scilab Console. (It took me 11 hours to do it BTW)

I know it’s a weird module which may not be very useful to the general users of Scilab, but as I said I am working on  a digital assistant based in Scilab which can do a variety of things, so I had to add this functionality sooner or later. Since it was pretty much easy to do so I started with it.

My next goal towards making Scilab smart is to add the ability to store appointments. For example: Scilab will remind you of an appointment or ring an alarm at a particular time.

Some of the already available modules on Image and Video Processing may help in developing the face recognition functionality. Although I would have to spend a lot of time on understanding the basics of that before I can attempt such a thing. But it would be a great accomplishment if achieved.

I would also like to spend some time and play with the audio files processing on Scilab. I haven’t really worked on it and it seems that Scilab has a lot of potential in that field. A read-out loud feature would definitely be a welcome addition to the already feature-rich Scilab.

If you would like to contribute to this project then hit me up through the comments section below or the ‘About Page’ on this Blog.

 

 

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