More than just talk

VoxCommando offers its users a choice of two different speech recognition engines. The standard Microsoft Desktop Engine is a great choice for those who natively speak one of the 8 languages it supports and who want to have the flexibility of free dictation and voice training profiles. For our global community, we also support Windows Speech Platform 11 (SP), which provides speech recognition in more than 20 different world languages and accents, does not require training, and works better with Bluetooth microphones.

VoxCommando has multiple options for handling when and how it listens for commands, depending on user hardware and preferences.

There are three listening states: on, standby, and off. In Prefix Mode, VC remains in standby and will only try to execute commands if it first hears your special prefix (e.g. “Jarvis”). Users can choose their own prefixes. Prefix Mode is an important way to minimize false positives for those who want to use an open-air microphone.

It’s also possible to use events to switch between listening states and to turn system volume down temporarily in order to minimize background noise. Among other options, events can be generated by a keyboard shortcut, a USB button, a motion sensor, even a z-wave or X10 switch. It’s your choice. Find the best solution for your environment.

More than 150 core actions, and over 30 different plugins allow you to create custom solutions for virtually any situation. Context sensitive groups of commands, custom Python scripting, and an api that supports command line, TCP, UDP, and HTTP control mean there is almost always a way to make VoxCommando control or respond to input from other programs or devices as long as they provide some means of communication.

Driven by your imagination

Request media by name, rating, playlist, and more by interfacing with many popular media programs. Control XBMC, MediaMonkey, iTunes, Window Media Center, MediaPortal, or JRiver Media Center using dedicated plugins and prebuilt configurations. (Some configurations are already translated into languages other than English.)

Control home automation devices using plugins for Vera (Z-Wave), Philips Hue, Wemo, X10, Sonos, TCP, UDP, and HTTP protocols. Tie it all together by combining other capabilities of VoxCommando such as weather, TTS, multimedia and logic to take your home automation to a new level.

Customize your own macros and choose your own voice commands.

Macros with logic and looping. Logic Example: if the forecast predicts rain, then VC can tell you to wear your Wellies and grab an umbrella. Looping Example: slow/fast screen scrolling until you say “stop”.

Sharing commands or groups of commands is as simple as copy and paste. Commands in your command tree are copied to the clipboard as XML text, and can be shared on the forum in a code box.

VoxCommando doesn’t just talk to other programs, it listens too. Other programs can send messages to VoxCommando via UDP, HTTP, TCP, or command line that trigger events or execute actions. You can even host a simple web server.

Python plugin opens up a world of possibilities for coders who want to extend VoxCommando’s functionality beyond the existing plugins.

Store and retrieve tables of name/value pairs for mapping from a name to a value. Example: storing your infrared remote codes under friendly button names.

Create and respond to a variety of “events” based on timers, system state, or input from other programs.

Gather text information from almost any website, which can then be used in your macros to make decisions or to provide feedback to the user. Powerful regular expressions allow you to isolate the data you want. This method can also be used to generate lists of items than can be used in other voice commands.

Our Scrape.Get, Scrape.Put, and Scrape.Post actions allow users with no programming knowledge to interact with 3rd-party RESTful APIs. Communicate with a large variety of HTTP services, including push notification tools like Instapush and various home automation systems.

Request weather and other information that the computer can share with you using pop-up messages and TTS (Text-To-Speech).

Use keyboard key presses or key combinations to execute macros.

Use any standard Windows microphone, take advantage of Kinect’s v1 advanced audio features, or use any number of Android devices running our VoxWav app (Free and Pro versions available).

Interface directly with USB-UIRT, Global Caché iTach, Arduino, or a host of other devices through Eventghost to learn and send infrared commands to virtually any IR-capable device.

Use VoxCommando’s Python plugin to add voice control to your Arduino projects.

Communicate with a huge variety of other devices and programs via bidirectional communication with EventGhost (a free program for Windows).

Keyboard and mouse emulation (works with most video games like WOW).

Have the computer read you information about your media while it’s playing, provide home-automation status reports, even read from web-based information sources. The possibilities are endless.

Run other programs and utilities, and pass them optional command line parameters. Retrieve the application’s output, if any.

Check how many new email messages you have and read a summary of each message (Gmail only). Send email messages using any SMTP account, communicate with IFTTT, and more.

Wake other devices (that support WOL) on your LAN.

VC’s portable format allows you to run multiple instances, create different configurations in separate folders, and easily copy and back up your configurations. Great for experimenting!

Instruct your Windows system to sleep, hibernate, turn off your display, adjust volume etc.

Repeated actions or sets of actions allow you to do things a variable number of times. Example: “move right 5”, or “volume up 10”.

Extensive list of plugins

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