Mawqey - Abdulrahman Saleh Khamis

Asiri: Let Siri Speak Your Language

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:19:14 +0000

I would like to introduce to you Asiri, the SiriProxy plugin that allows Siri to talk and interpret many other languages, that are not currently supported by Apple. As with SiriProxy, It doesn’t require you to jailbreak your iPhone 4S, unless you’re not using iPhone 4S.

The First Idea and Its Quick Death

I had this idea when the guys from Applidium first reverse-engineered the Siri protocol, and published their work. I knew there’s no technical limitation for my idea, since I can intercept the bit flow, see all kind of communication that’s going from the iPhone to Apple, and back, well, except for one. I didn’t have access to a good Arabic, or multi-language, speech recognition system.

Since developing one from scratch will take a lot of time and effort. I quickly scratched the idea out of my head and continued with my life.

Reviving The Idea

Then, while I was reading about the new features of HTML5, and draft papers, I came across the speech API. It was proposed by Google. Further research led me to an actual implementation and usage of Google APIs.

I saw Siri idea coming back to life with this new finding. However, there’s one tiny problem, the access to the APIs is not documented, which means shouldn’t be used by the public.

Seeing that my project depends not only on one undocumented API, but two, I figured I will use it for testing out my idea at least.

Different Audio Codecs

I faced a small issue during my testing. Apple uses Speex for encoding the voice bit stream, while Google uses FLAC. I think Speex is also used by Google, but I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working out for me. I came to the same finding as Mike Pultz, that they’re using a special form of Speex.

I wrote a small library in C called speer, to convert Apple’s Speex to raw PCM 16bit LE. I may enhance it in the future to convert to FLAC directly, but I just needed something quick and dirty for my idea, and to proof my concept.

When the library was ready, I wrote Asiri, which depends on it, as well as ffmpeg, to convert the PCM from speer to FLAC, and I had the first implementation of my idea working. Few days pass by, and further enhancing both speer, and Asiri, led to today, the public release of Asiri.

Now, both Asiri and speer are a work in progress, and I really hope anyone who wants to participate, to do so freely. Both are released under dual-license terms, GPL and MIT.

I hope you will enjoy playing with Asiri.

Experimenting with Android and Arduino

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:37:18 +0000

Ever since I got into the world of mobile development, I always wanted to do more than just writing apps. I always wanted to interact with the physical world with my mobile. So lately, I have discovered an awesome open source electronics i/o board called Arduino. I ordered one from Sparkfun, and it took around 20 days to get to me, it would’ve gotten to me a little earlier, if the carrier company didn’t think it was an explosive unit.

As I got my Arduino, I had to dust out my electronics knowledge that I got back when I was at college. Arduino really makes it easy, even for the non electronics geek, to get into electronics really quickly.

My First Real Arduino Experiment

After a quick refresh into the world of electronics, I wanted to do a little experiment that would allow me to interface my newly bought Nexus S phone with Arduino. Since I didn’t connect my bluesmirf bluetooth module yet, I had to interface with Arduino using serial connection. There’s one problem though, I didn’t want to connect a “mobile device” with wires to a board.

The solution was simple:

Connect the Arduino board to a host computer
Run a TCP server on the host computer, that waits for commands from a client
The TCP server translates those commands, and sends them to the Arduino’s serial port

Circuit Design

The components setup is easy, you would control the 10 LED graph bar, as individual LEDs with current limiting resistors. Looking at the datasheet for the LED graph bar, it says that I would need 20mA of current to operate the LEDs. Unfortunately, I don’t have lower resistors than my 330Ω, so I used 10 330Ω resistors to provide around 15mA to each LED, which was enough.

LED Graph Bar Arduino Sketch

Arduino comes with a powerful language called the Arduino programming language, which is based on C/C++. So I had no problem understanding the language quickly, and start interacting with the board.

I connected the LEDs to ports 2 to 11 on the Arduino board, and sat them to output either HIGH (5v) to light on, or LOW (0v) to light off. Also in the setup function, I initiate the serial communication with baud rate = 9600.

As the loop function starts, I wait for serial bytes to arrive, as the bytes arrive, they arrive in ASCII encoded stream. I had to do a little conversion from ASCII to integer, and if the integer is between 0 and 9, I light the LEDs that correspond to that number plus 1, So if I receive 3, I would light 4 LEDs. I count from 0, because I wanted to keep my communication under 1 byte, plus that’s how machines count.

TCP To Serial Communication Server

To let the Nexus S communicate wirelessly with Arduino, I had to write something that would allow me to send serial commands from the mobile phone to Arduino. So I wrote a simple TCP server in Python. The Python server would receive the desired commands over WiFi, and translates those commands to Arduino using the serial port. I wouldn’t have used this server, if I connected the bluetooth module, since I can send those commands directly from Android phone to Arduino.

The TCP server is simple, I use the awesome library pySerial to open the serial port on my Arduino, with the same baud rate as defined on the sketch. If the connection has been established, I loop indefinitely waiting for commands, which in our case would be digits from 0 to 9. As I receive the digits, I convert them to ASCII, and send them to Arduino. If the letter ‘Q’ was received, the communication ends.

The Android App

The TCP server waits for commands to be sent from any device that it connects to, I had the server running on port 50000 of the same machine that is connected to the Arduino. and all I had to do is send the numbers of LEDs that I want to light. Using the accelerometer sensor on the Nexus S, it was really easy. I just had to filter out the jitter, as the accelerometer sensor is very sensitive, so I could send normal integers over the air to light how many LEDs I want.

The full source code of the app is available under GNU GPLv3 license on my github repository, please feel free to use it.

Resources

Qontacts Support For Maemo and More Updates

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:02:02 +0000

I’m happy to announce today, that I have officially added the Maemo platform, to the list of platforms that Qontacts supports. I have received a lot of requests to support the Maemo platform, e.g. Nokia N900, and I’m glad that it’s finally out there for the public. I have updated the main website, with screenshots, and information, as well as the help section, with instructions on how to download and install the app.

It was built with Qt framework for C++, the framework that Nokia is pushing for their devices. I have to say that I’m amazed of how well this framework is supported, at least on the Maemo operating system. I found it very well structured and easy, and above all, it’s widely adopted framework to build reliable cross-platform apps.

As it’s part of Qontacts full suite, this version is also licensed under the open source license GPL version 3. You can find the whole source code on Github.

Qontacts List of Supported Platforms

With the recent support of Maemo, here is the list of Qontacts’ supported platforms.

iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch)
Android
BlackBerry
Java ME (Nokia Series 40, S60, Sony Ericsson)
Windows Mobile (through JavaFX)
Maemo (Nokia N900)

How To Download and Install for Maemo

I have uploaded the app on the Extras-devel repository of Maemo.org. To be able to download and install it, you can follow these simple steps.

First, you need to make sure that you have updated your Maemo software, to the latest software release, which at the time of this writing, is PR 1.2 (V10.2010.19-1). You need to add and enable a new application catalog, which is the Maemo extras-devel.

Go to Application manager –> Application catalogs –> New
Fill the following information to enable the Maemo extras-devel catalog
1. Catalog name: Maemo Extras-devel
2. Web address: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel/
3. Distribution: fremantle
4. Components: free non-free
Once the new catalog refreshes, go to Download -> Utilities. Start typing qontacts, and you will find it there. Just click on it to install it.

Final Words

I would like to thank my friend Hichem Zait, for his testing and feedback for the Maemo version.

I hope Qontacts was useful, and served its purpose. If you used it, please share with me your comments, and thoughts, I would love to hear them out. Finally, as a friend of mine once said, enjoy your updated Qontacts.

Qontacts Official Public Release

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:04:38 +0000

Today I’m really happy to announce the official public release of the free, open source, cross platform mobile application Qontacts v1.0.

Qontacts is a mobile application, that can update your address book contacts, stored on your handset, to the new Qatari numbering plan, in a fast and easy way. I’ve already introduced the pre-release version last week, and it was very well received by the public, and I was very happy that it did. Here are some of what the media was writing about it:

Qontacts Behind the Scenes

This project has been in the making for 4 months, ever since ictQATAR’s announcement. I’m really proud that it is going public for free, that is free as in “free speech”, and free as in “free water”.

I’ve spent so much time, and money, developing it, from buying all sorts of mobile handsets to test on, to getting certified from RIM, and Apple, in order to develop and publish apps on their platforms. However, I was very glad to do it, because I knew that this kind of application will be very important to the Qatari community, and I wanted to help my country, even if that meant to sacrifice, at least I knew the community will find it useful.

I wanted Qontacts to be free for everybody, not just for people who belong to one mobile operator, and not the rest. That made me lose offers, and probably my current job, but I think I’ve made the right choice.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank everybody who participated in Qontacts development, either by testing it, and giving me comments and suggestions, or by giving me the moral support I really needed. These people are:

Tariq Alsada
Hassan Albader
Ahmad Mustafa Noor
Ammar Fakhoury
Josh Weiner

Finally, I hope that you will find Qontacts useful, and if you did, you can consider donating to help me continue developing such useful applications.

Qontacts: Mobile App that Updates Qatari Contacts Pre-Release

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:00:56 +0000

I am about to officially release Qontacts, the open source cross platform mobile app, that updates all of the Qatari contacts stored on the mobile handset’s address book.

Starting from July 28, 2010, phone numbers in Qatar will be expanded from seven to eight digits. Qontacts works by analyzing your contacts, that are stored on your device, then displays contacts which need to be updated to the new Qatari numbering plan.

I have been working very hard on it for the past 4 months, and so excited that it will get out soon. The iPhone version is already out, and you can get it from the AppStore right now. As for the rest, there will be a BlackBerry, Android, and Java ME versions coming out soon.

Key Features

Analyze and display contacts that need to be updated, with how many phone numbers to update.*
Preview the updated numbers of your contacts, before you update.
Select some, or all of your contacts, to do batch update.
Fully localized to Arabic, and English languages.**

* Qontacts smart analysis detects only the Qatari numbers, that are 7 digits in length, or starting with 00974, or starting with +974. It won’t update any updated numbers, i.e. with 8 digits, or numbers that don’t conform to the rules of the new numbering plan, defined by ictQATAR.

** The display language is based on your handset’s settings, for example, if your handset is set to Arabic, it’ll display Arabic interface.

Supported Handsets

iOS 3.0 or later (Tested on iOS 4)
BlackBerry 4.5 or later
Android 1.5 or later
Any device capable of running Java ME apps (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, etc)

Screenshots

Here are screenshots of Qontacts, running on the above mentioned platforms.

iPhone

BlackBerry

Android

Nokia

Download the Pre-Release version

A pre-release version is now available. You can download the pre-release version by going to the following URL, from your supported handset device, and it will auto detect your handset, and push the right version of Qontacts to your device.
http://www.qontactsapp.com/download/

The full source code of these apps will be released in the upcoming days on my page at Github.

I will really appreciate the feedback, and please don’t forget to rate the iPhone version.

A New Era in My Life

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:59:23 +0000

A new era has started in my life, and today marks this era. I have been quiet for the past few months, and that is due to the transition that I’ve began taking early this year.

If you don’t know me that well, I have been an active web developer, who develops and writes mainly in Arabic, on a blog called Almashroo.

Web development has been my passion for the past 10 years, and I couldn’t imagine a day, where I don’t write a JavaScript line here, and PHP line there, complementing them with some (X)HTML and CSS.

Entering The Mobile World

Today, I’m moving on to a more interesting and challenging area of development, that is, mobile software development. I’ve spent the past few months developing an open source cross platform mobile app, as a first project, to officially get into this small, and yet challenging world.

I can’t wait to tell you all about, as I’m currently preparing the official web site that hosts it, stay tuned for more information that will come shortly.

What About the Web Development?

Well, I’m first and foremost a web developer, who still enjoys it. However, I think the knowledge that I’m getting currently from the mobile, will in fact benefit me greatly as web developer.

Will I return to the web development soon? The short answer, probably yes, but it will take a me a while to get back.

I have redesigned and developed my web site from the grounds up, using the new, and exciting features of HTML5 and CSS3. I used CodeIgniter as a framework, for the main site, along with Markdown to control the content, and WordPress for this blog. For the people who knew my website before, I have converted it to English, so I can communicate my thoughts to the rest of world.

I have also collected some of my open source projects, and put them on Github, so you can see and fork them as you like.

What is this Mobile App I am Working On?

As I said previously, it’s an open source cross platform mobile app, that will benefit my country’s users a lot, this app will be supported on multiple platforms, iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and any mobile that can run Java ME apps.

A blog post announcing it will be posted right here soon, and when I say soon, I mean in the next few days. So stay tuned.