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....?
