The story behind I_B9

The story behind I_B9

The idea for I_B9 was born at the Chiller show in NJ back in October 2004.  I brought my robot to the show, and had his sound system hooked up to my laptop.  This gave me the ability to play on demand a small number of custom recorded robot phrases to interact with visitors to our robot room.  Myself, and about a dozen other Robot Builders had a blast interacting with the show guests!  We were all amazed to see what a wonderful new dimension this added to the robot, even with the limited number of phrases we had.  But, throughout the weekend, we all kept saying, "I wish he could say..."

After returning from NJ, I set out to organize a small group of builders to brainstorm and author a comprehensive list of interactive phrases, then have them recorded by Dick Tufeld.  We needed phrases to talk with people who wanted pictures, sayings for all the Holidays, warnings not to touch the robot, to correct people who call him Robby, lines for little kids, many witty come backs, and light-hearted insults, compliments, thanks, apologies, phrases for mobile robots, commentary about himself (the Robot), and more.  We ended up accomplishing all those needs and also came up with dozens of other great phrases.  Power up sequences to explain the text on the buttons, the three laws of robotics, "...building a B9 robot... Priceless!", and many, many more.

After the phrases were recorded, each and every phrase was painstakingly edited and perfected for the absolute best audio quality possible, including the processing and filter needed to sound just like the robot from the 60's..  This part of the project literally took months.

During this process, we decided a much better method to organize and play all the new phrases was needed, rather than just double-clicking .mp3 files form a Windows Explorer window.  So, Michael Joyce set out to create some software to do just that.  The result was orders of magnitude more powerful than what any of us had expected!

The best part of this story is that you can now take advantage of this collective, creative effort with your very own copy of I_B9!

Craig Reinbrecht