Topics

1

What is a good microphone for speech recognition? / Smart Microphone

« on: November 25, 2016, 09:31:56 AM »

Hi. A few years ago I used VC and eventhost to build a smart living room. Both amazing bits of sotware but in the end the hardware let it down. X10 is awful. IR blasting from eventghost is not great (IR is never fun for home automation) and the microphone was'nt upto the job when you have a movie or music blasting, or people chatting. Great in demo but in the end easier to use a remote and light switches.

Forwards a few years and we have z-wave, smartthings hub and the highly thought of Amazon echo (or dot) which seems uncanny at picking up commands. So I ordered a bunch of stuff, a few amazon dots, a smartthings hub, a z-wave USB stick, and z-wave lighting modules. However while these bits link together brilliantly, they are a bit limited in a way that VC and EG just isn't. I could easily swap this system to VC/EG which I'd love too but what worries me is the mic.

I did a forum search, seems not possible to use the Amazon echo mic, I read someone saying they could get just as good results, so I looked at the VC wiki, doesnt seem the mic section has been updated for 3 years. No one seems to have a gold standard for array mics, kinects never seem to work as well asa people hoped.

I googled and found and article on beamforming "smart mics" (http://www.xmos.com/blog/xmos/post/introducing-xcore-voice-smart-microphone-applications). Can anyone suggest a type of mic of this level, not costing hundreds of £££'s? It's amazing really I just paid £40 for an amazoin dot that has a 7 way direction mic which is almost perfect yet years later options for a simple mic still seem very limited....?

2

Kodi (XBMC) Frodo / Gotham / Isengard / Jarvis / No VC audio during movie playback

« on: April 24, 2015, 09:50:13 AM »

Simple problem with I guess a simple answer. When XBMC is playing a movie in DTS, there is no audio feedback from voxcommando. I guess the audio track of the movie takes over totally and until you stop the movie you can hear no beeps, or TTS voice speak...?

3

VoxCommando Basics and Core Features / Idle Standby

« on: September 08, 2013, 01:42:54 PM »

My VC setup is working fairly well ini practice however I find in real life situations it tends to fall down - clearly due totally on my part to bad programming.

the two problems I need to resolve well:

1) Events are randomly triggered from audio in the room. In which case I've realized VC MUST be on standby most of the time.

2) Cannot control VC with any ambient noise, or of course trigger a VC.On or VC.standby command if any music is playing etc.

Does VC have a feature, or could it be put in that if VC hasn't recevied a confirmed command and carried out an action it will timeout into standby after a certain time?

I don't want to use VC.Single as that doesn't work when you want to string a few commands together (eg "subtitles", "next subtitles", or "go right, "go right", "select". I used a 7s timer to trigger another event of "VC.Standby" which works to a point but became a little unpredictable.

Also with VC.Single, if I add a mute/partialmute event as I need too, but then don't issue a command it will never stop listening or resume the volume. I'd like it to flick back on if no one gives a command.

4

What is a good microphone for speech recognition? / Good sub £50 mic?

« on: September 02, 2013, 03:59:00 PM »

Hi, using VC with a chinese USB headset that cost about $10. Even that works pretty great from 6 feet away or so.

However in search of even better accuracy at a distance, considering a better dedicated usb mic. Alot of discussion on array mics, read the wiki but not many recommendations of fairly cheap mics. I researched a bit and found two common types - Dynamic and Condenser..... anyone know which is more suitable for us?

Thing is quite hard to know what makes a good voice recognition at a distance! You can ready reviews on studio mics all day long but most of the features the money goes on we really don't care about!

I see in "Mr Wolf's" video he has a nice looking mic, likes like a samson or something....be quite interested to hear peoples views on $10 budget mics compared to more expensive "proper" studio mics....

5

I will post new features here (LEGACY BOARD ONLY) / USBUIRT vs MCE IR transceivers

« on: September 01, 2013, 08:42:15 AM »

Just a heads up re/ 1.140 and 1.150. I thought I'd try the  USBUIRT function and Map function. Activated the plugin and on restart VC crashed everytime. I tried both versions and I tried it on 2 different Windows 7 machines, one 32 the other 64bit.


I thought I could use the MCE remote IR transceiver as a UIRT as wolfman has done. Doubt that would cause the crash though right? Is it possible to just copy and paste the hex codes into the map table from my pronto software?

6

General Discussion / Discrete Pause / Play for XBMC

« on: August 30, 2013, 08:53:53 PM »

Going well with VC. Only issue is it won't recognise anything I'm saying when have loud music / movie on. Obviosuly not the VC.On command which almost sets the volume lower...

Decided to get round this by fitting a USB activated button and mapping it to a keypress in EventGhost. Stick the button next to the sofa and can use it to trigger VC to listen and lower the volume - excellent.

Problem: Fine for music but as I use spdif digital sound for my movies (5.1) no volume control is possible. I would totally mute the sound but that doesn't work either, just ignores spdif stream. My only idea for a work around was to Pause the media rather than mute it until command issued. Problem is XBMC and my remote only seem to use a rocker Play / Pause option, and I can't find a discreet Pause and seperate Play command for XBMC like you can usually find. Obviously this is a mess if you give the initial command when something is paused, and it actually un-pauses the media when you are trying to give a vocal command. I've looked into xbmc keyboard.xml and found a seperate listing for Play and Pause, however I have found these both seem to actually still act as rockers of Play/Pause command.

Seems ridiculous in a program like XBMC when so infinitely programmable - anyone know a way?

7

General Discussion / 2 Way Conversation!

« on: August 29, 2013, 05:47:23 PM »

Hi All. Amazing bit of software, enjoying playing around.

I've spent last hour trying to get some "Human Touch" going. A user prompt, a computer question, a user prompt, and a computers response and action.  I've watched the youtube videos on "human touch" which almost gets it done but in that it is achieved by starting a new branch, which really isn't part of the original conversation, or branch, and there fore seems it could be triggered at any time out of place. Let me explain what I want to achieve - if I can do this I will apply it to all sorts of other uses.


Me: Hello Computer

VC: Hello. Who am I speaking too?

(Now from this point I would like to have 3 possible people that would then branch to seperate replies and actions. It would be nice if I could say any other name for a simple polite end of tree. IE, User: "Guest".... VC) "Hello 'Guest' enjoy using VoxCommando. Would you like to listen to music?" I tried using payload but i hit a brick wall past one user input and one computer response in the same branch.)

*branch 1*
User: Michael                                                      

VC: Hello Michael. Would you like to watch recent TV episodes.?

User: "yes"

VC) Displays recent TV

*branch 2*
User: Lisa

VC: Hello Lisa would you like to listen to your favourite Music?

----you get the idea!....



Seems like it should be easily achievable but no matter how I mess around with logic, and payloads past the first input output I hit a wall.