Transbot Community Testing Needed

Transbot Updates
Transbot is now in its first version stable enough for community testing! The team is looking for help testing out transbot for bugs and feedback. Check out the following two dedecated channels on:

irc.freenode.net: #transbot-test-en, #transbot-test-es

An instance of the lastest version of transbot is present in both channels. It is set up to forward any activity from one channel to the other, translating respectively.

How you can help
Right now what the transbot team needs most is community feedback. To be brief we need help with: identifying bugs, testing usability, and knowing what the community wants for further functionality.

Our wiki test page will be updated frequently describing exactly what type of feedback we need as well as how to submit it. If there is any problems with the page any feedback, comments or suggestions can be sent to mrt8449@rit.edu or tjr1351@rit.edu.

Presentation Time

Recently our open source class presented our projects to a local Pythonista group. The most important thing that resulted in this was some good advice to get out a current copy of transbot. Currently we are setting up a dedicated sever that will host two channels where any IRC user can come in and try out transbot in its current state. This will be a great way to get easy user feedback and get more people interested in the project. We showed a live demo of transbot during the presentation. It went well, but I would like to have more functionality before the next one.

Status update

Currently I am working on improving the command line interface with transbot. Previously it was a bit clumsy and confusing so putting some standardization will help it be more user friendly. Eventually we want to get a basic GUI to run the program so it will be easy to use on the XO laptops without the command line. After doing some testing speed is definitely an issue that will have to be dealt with and at the moment the best looking solution is to implement the twisted framework.

Transbot future changes.

A lot of idea have been floating around the last few days on how to proceed with transbot. It is obvious that the code needs quite a bit of tweaking and cleaning up before we can think about adding onto the project. The difficult part is that there is so many directions we can take to remodel the design. The current method is using an event driven system that uses irc events generated from a python IRC API called irclib. This is not a bad approach, but many of the event handlers need to be cleaned up if this approach is picked.

Another big change is the google translate API's flexibility to detect the source language effectively. The current version of transbot does not take advantage of this which will lead to more flexibility. In a situation where the bot was translating for a channel that contained multiple languages this approach will allow the bot to still effectively translate. Under the current implementation the bot would only be able to translate the language that the channel was currently set to.