Good mic in 2020

[Jan]

Ok so it's 2020 now and many of the mics recommended here arent available anymore.

I'm looking for a "room" mic as good as the ones used in amazons echo. Is there something like this? Or is the echo still the best quality wise? Using voxcommando to me entirely depends on whether I can find a mic that works for me and my family. As much as I love this programm...if I can't use it properly I am forced to resort to the mainstream products (google, amazon). I tried the emeet m0 but sent it back as accuracy was bad (I didnt do speech training though). Im not sure if the emeet m2 is any better. Support so far hasnt answered my question if it has better mics than the m0. Are these conference mics (emeet, jabra etc) recommendable at all?

Hope there are still some active users here willing to share their  experiences.


Best regards!

[jitterjames]

If you want a whole home or large room microphone solution for hands free voice commands then I don't think you will be able to find anything that can compete with Amazon or Google. They sell their hardware at a loss in order to drive other profits.  Also the hardware based wake word and cloud recognition capabilities are really required for whole home hands free that isn't constantly triggering by accident.

You may be able to find a good microphone that can hear you well from across the room and that works well with VoxCommando but it will only work when the environment is essentially silent.

VoxCommando comes into play when you want control and flexibility over what you can actually do with your voice commands.

In my home we use a combination of wireless mics, Voxwav on the Android and passing commands from Alexa to VoxCommando either directly, or by triggering scenes in our Vera ZWave system. We also just use the Alexa directly for some things that it is good at like grocery lists, controlling lights, and finding out how old celebrities are. 

It sucks but that's just how it is, and it's probably the main reason why the VoxCommando community is a lot more quiet these days.

[Jan]

That is a pitty. Im using hubitat smart home hub and would be able to control everything via voxcommando - and this locally. So no cloud listening and no lag at all. But without a decent mic its all useless. I believe so far no one has found a way to directly connect alexas or google mics to voxcommando? Also what do you mean with what you said about the wakeword and cloud? I thought voxcommando could also be triggered by wakeword?

I found a lot of multimic arrays on amazon (jabra, emeet) that should function like an echo/echo dot. They are used for conference meetings. But I have no idea how far inferior these are to the mic arrays used in an echo dot.

Also I read stuff about boundary mics which should be good for voxcommando. What about the current beyerdynamic ones? https://www.beyerdynamic.de/bm-32-b.html

[Kalle]

Hallo Jan,


Grenzflächen-Mikrofone, wie das von Beyer, benötigen zusätzliche Hardware (Verstärker mit Phantomspeisung / XLR Kabel) und sind sehr teuer. Wie gut das ganze funktioniert hat hier noch keiner getestet. Ich selbst habe es schon mit Boundarry-Mikrofonen versucht, leider mit keinen guten Ergebnissen.
Du kannst dir zum testen das Beyerdynamic Mikrofon bei Musikhaus Thomann bestellen und gegebenenfalls wieder zurück senden.


Das Jabra Speak 410 und 710 habe ich ebenfalls getestet - diese funktionieren nur auf kurze Distanz zuverlässig.
Eine gute und zuverlässige Lösung ist ein Alexa Dot in Verbindung mit dem VoxCommando skill. Wie aber James schon sagte, funktioniert dies nur mit einer Internetverbindung und ist nicht Autark. Der Vorteil hierbei ist, das Du die normalen Funktionen von Alexa und die Komplexität von VoxCommando zusammen nutzen kannst.

Hier geht es zur Alexa integration in VC: https://voxcommando.com/forum/index.php?topic=2852.msg24229#msg24229


Gruß,
Kalle

[jitterjames]

I believe so far no one has found a way to directly connect alexas or google mics to voxcommando? Also what do you mean with what you said about the wakeword and cloud? I thought voxcommando could also be triggered by wakeword?

As far as I know, noone has found a way to hijack the audio stream directly from these microphones.  But even if you could, you might not get very good results feeding this audio into VoxCommando.  With Alexa you can listen to the audio that was captured on their webpage and the quality is generally very poor sounding.  The thing with Alexa is that they have 100% control over every stage of the process, from the engineering of the microphone, to the digital signal processing, and the compression used in uploading the stream, to the powerful cloud based recognition which can be engineered to get the most out of that very specific sounding audio.  VoxCommando on the other hand uses Microsoft speech engine which came with Windows Vista and has not really changed very much since it was first released.  It is not designed to work with a specific sound profile and requires decent audio quality without too much background noise.  With a good audio input it does work extremely well but it was pretty much designed to be used with a headset.

VoxCommado does use a prefix to reduce false positives.  It works reasonably well but it is not the same thing as a wake word.  It might be possible to create something like a wake word for VoxCommando but you would need to be able to switch the recognition engine on instantly and it usually does not do well with that.  When first turning the speech engine on, I find I usually have to wait a couple of seconds before speaking in order to get good recognition.

I found a lot of multimic arrays on amazon (jabra, emeet) that should function like an echo/echo dot. They are used for conference meetings. But I have no idea how far inferior these are to the mic arrays used in an echo dot.

Also I read stuff about boundary mics which should be good for voxcommando. What about the current beyerdynamic ones? https://www.beyerdynamic.de/bm-32-b.html

Multimic arrays that you find will probably not work like the echo, or if they do they will probably be extremely expensive.  Many of them also work using Bluetooth which is generally not great for Microsoft's speech engine.  With the SP engine you might be OK using Bluetooth.  If you find a specific array mic that is affordable and you think it might work then tell us the model number and we can take a look.  At the end of the day the only way to know will be to try it.

Some of the boundary mics probably could work well with VoxCommando but they will pick up EVERYTHING which as I mentioned earlier is only good if you live in a completely silent environment.  In reality this is almost never the case, and certainly makes listening to music impossible.