Orbit Devlog #2 — First Steps Toward Command Recognition

Hello everyone! After taking a short break, I’ve continued working on Orbit and started moving beyond the basic chat interface.

This time, I focused on improving the chat system and making Orbit understand some simple commands instead of always giving the same response.

Progress

• Improved the chat interface and message display.
• Changed how messages are stored by representing each message as an object containing its text, sender and a unique ID.
• This makes the conversation more organized because Orbit can distinguish between messages sent by the user and messages sent by the assistant.
• The unique ID also helps React identify each message correctly when rendering the message list, especially when two messages contain the same text.
• Created a local list of applications with associated keywords.
• Added support for recognizing applications such as Spotify and Discord.
• Orbit can recognize different words related to the same application.
• Created a separate function to process messages and generate responses.
• Learned more about arrays, objects, loops and functions in TypeScript.
• Started thinking about how Orbit should distinguish between a user’s intention and the application they want to interact with.

For example, you can see an image of Orbit and a few chat messages below:

Current Limitations

• The command recognition system is still very basic. At the moment, Orbit mainly looks for keywords in the user’s message. This means that it can sometimes misunderstand what the user actually wants to do.
  For example, it currently knows that “Spotify” or “music” can refer to Spotify, but it doesn’t really understand the difference between:

“Open Spotify”
or
“Close Spotify”

It also doesn’t actually open the applications yet Orbit is currently only generating a response

What I Learned

• One of the things I’ve been focusing on is trying to understand the code instead of just copying solutions.
• I learned how I can store application information as objects and then use loops to search through their keywords.
• This also made me realize that I don’t want Orbit to become a huge collection of if statements. I want the application information and the command-processing logic to be separated so that the system can grow more easily.

Next Steps

• My next goal is to make Orbit distinguish between the action and the application.

For example:

Open Spotify:
- Action: Open
- Application: Spotify

Close Spotify:
- Action: Close
- Application: Spotify

• After that, I want to connect these commands to actual Windows applications so that Orbit can start performing actions instead of only replying with text.

Thank you for your attention and tell me what do you think about Orbit