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‌Introduction

What is Synthia? Synthia is a tool to help you do your job. Lexically, Synthia combines SynthEyes, "I", and "A". You might have an inclination to put the I and A together to form AI, as in "Artificial Intelligence." But there's no such thing.

Synthia is foremost useful, an "Instructible Assistant" to assist you in operating SynthEyes. Synthia helps you by doing odd jobs, performing repetitive tasks, and by eliminating the need to grossly re-position the mouse or drill through several levels of menus.

You can tell Synthia what to do in English, either by typing or by speaking your instructions to it; it replies by text or out loud. Synthia can be told not only what to do, but how to do things.

Tip : You don’ t have to use speech input or output . You can use Synthia just fine from its text entry box. That ’s fine, neither we nor Synthia care either way. It ’s just a tool for getting useful stuff done. See the “Synthia ” section of preferences in SynthEyes for Synthia ’s initial settings.

If you have some favorite commands, you can put them in a file, and trigger them from SynthEyes's Script menu, or a button on a SynthEyes scriptbar.

Tip : See the tutorial Putting Synthia Commands on a Toolbar to do so.

You might think "Synthia is Siri or Google Now for SynthEyes." Siri and Google Now understand and act on only a comparatively small list of commands, and search for anything else. Synthia understands a large dialect of imperative English and acts based on that understanding.

Synthia can be told to do tasks that would otherwise require you to know an endless number of special tools, or how to use a programming language, which most artists do not. For example,

delete the unsolved far trackers.

Synthia does not contain any speech recognition or synthesis code. Those two capabilities are integrated into modern versions of Windows and OS X (and there are third party voice packages available as well). This is good because it is an active area of improvement by the operating system vendors, and Synthia benefits immediately from their improvements. [On OS X, be sure to read the Microphone and Speech Setup instructions to install the better version of OS X's voice recognition. Comparable speech recognition capabilities aren’t yet available in Linux.]

Synthia determines what to do about what you told it, and does that. Synthia can understand many useful things, but not everything you might contrive. Whether it is talking about constructing a house, a medical procedure, a legal matter, or your favorite sport, you need to know the right language to communicate effectively.

It's just the same for Synthia, which has already been taught a lot about SynthEyes tracking (and might be taught other tasks and programs too).

In this document we'll describe what you can say to Synthia, with practical examples and some nods to the fine points. As you read this, you'll see some commands that haven't been explained quite yet—previews—that you can try as you read. There are also small exercises to try (answers at end). They are often very easy. You'll learn a lot more if you play along with the previews and exercises.

Tip : Be sure to check the answers if you are stuck!

If Synthia doesn’t understand something, you can tell it what you mean, in terms of statements that Synthia already understands, such as

define "rewind" means "go to the start frame".

Synthia understands everything in terms of rules; this sentence creates a new rule that tells Synthia what rewind means. That's how Synthia has already learned much of what it does (including this).

And you can tell it your way of doing things:

define "process solve completed" means "make the trackers green, then make the far trackers sky blue and make the unsolved trackers orange".

Synthia is just starting out, and still has a lot to learn. Synthia isn’t "smart" about figuring things out by itself. As a computer program, it leverages its strengths in storing and applying large quantities of information (rules), a "big data" approach to being able to understand the wide variety of natural language.

To that end, Synthia has cloud features that help combine instruction from all the users, so that it can get more and more useful over time.

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