Is voice recognition reliable?

[comgle64]

Thinking of getting a mic and trying voice recognition. How reliable is it. Will it work if say I'm listening to music and try to send a command? I know a lot of it will depend on the quality of the mic. With a good quality mic how is it working out for all of you that are using it?

[Seer1001]

Related question about VR

I have a Bluetooth headset with a mic. I connect it to a PC running the speaker client. VR works if the room is completely quiet. Question: The same PC is running HSTouch. Can I create a button on the HSTouch screen that starts/stops the VR (Start listening) on the speaker client. I would use this same button to mute the TV and/or music so that VR will hear the command accurately. Any idea's appreciated

Tom

[Krumpy]

Somewhat off topic...

So just about every major TV manufacturer was demoing voice control of the TV last week at CES. While I am sure that there are some new aspects of this, we could do this with HomeSeer and an IR generating device about 10 years ago.

Not a 100% comparison but still kinda funny.

I for one will not say "volume up", "volume up". That will get old FAST!

[Rupp]

Can I create a button on the HSTouch screen that starts/stops the VR (Start listening) on the speaker client. Tom

Sure. Just use the scripting call to call hs.startListen
[$SCRIPT=&hs.startListen()]

See this post for more info:
http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=132134

[mrhappy]

In my (albeit very limited as it turned out) experience I did not get far with VR, alot will depend on your specific setup, hardware quality, background noise and even possibly acoustics of the room (?). I had an average microphone albeit nothing special and my experience was poor to say the least, perhaps a figure on around 20% success rate - put mine down to background noise as the mic was close but not directly next to the TV, it would often try and understand what the TV was saying and this is after changing the attention phrase, training it over and over, messing with volume etc.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have a Bluetooth headset with a mic. I connect it to a PC running the speaker client. VR works if the room is completely quiet. Question: The same PC is running HSTouch. Can I create a button on the HSTouch screen that starts/stops the VR (Start listening) on the speaker client. I would use this same button to mute the TV and/or music so that VR will hear the command accurately. Any idea's appreciated

Tom

The script commands hs.stoplisten/hs.startlisten are likely to be your friends here, add a couple of buttons and execute this commands as immediate script commands - you will need to specify the host with these though and if you are running multiple touchscreens you might end up with seperate projects for each screen to hold the seperate host parameters.

[Rotech]

You need a mic mixer with echo cancelation. The only one I know of is the AP800....,

[cadillackid]

can the HSTouch iOS client do voice recognition?

also what stops homeseer from acting on normal conversation...
"I forgot to turn the Lights Off on my jeep".. next thing im sitting in the dark in my kitchen because I said 'lights off'... will that happen?

or is it like star trek where I have to say 'computer'.. Lights off!

I have had homeseer for 8 years and have never done voice control... but it sounds fun
-Christopher

[mrhappy]

can the HSTouch iOS client do voice recognition?

also what stops homeseer from acting on normal conversation...
"I forgot to turn the Lights Off on my jeep".. next thing im sitting in the dark in my kitchen because I said 'lights off'... will that happen?

or is it like star trek where I have to say 'computer'.. Lights off!

I have had homeseer for 8 years and have never done voice control... but it sounds fun
-Christopher

You do have to give it an attention phrase before it tries to understand what you say to it but I found it never truly that reliable, you can change the phrase to suit. HSTouch does not do any VR yet AFAIK...

[NicolaiL]

In my 10+ years with HS I've not gotten round to setting up Voice Recognition. However, I keep thinking I should give it a go, I'm sure the kids would get great giggle value out of 'talking to the house'.

[heatvent]

In my experience, no. The problems I have had:

* Missunderstanding the spoken command happens often enough to be annoying
* Noise in the room gets missinterpreted as a command, then HS keeps saying "I don't understand" from every little noise until everything goes quiet again
* Background noise is always an issue, no matter how good the mic (phone rings, kids taking, TV). Computers are not smart enough to know you are watching a TV program or it isn't you talking it is someone else.

I do use it over the phone fairly often to check weather, messages, turn things on/off, etc. This works much better since it's not an open air mic.

What would be interesting to know, is there anyone actually using VR on a regular basis? I think there are a lot of posts where people have tried but gave up on it.

P.S. It is fun to play with the kids. I did that with my 3 year old the other day. I turned on VR on the speaker client in the den and then started telling lights to go on and off. He was bewildered by what was happening.

[ATEngineer]

Unfortunately, voice control of their environment is not a curiousity for many of my clients. I work with people with spinal cord injuries, who may have little or no hand and arm function. There are alternative access techniques for GUI access but they can be tiring if use for long periods of time. Voice control would provide another choice or modality for access/control of their environment.

One client struggles with a inVoca voice remote:

http://www.amazon.com/Trademark-Invo.../dp/B004BDRSLG

I would like to offer him an alternative with Homeseer if I can solve the problem of how to translate the number sequence received by the voice "channel select" command into a sequence of &hs.sendir commands

[Krumpy]

Chris,

We would really have to beg. But I hear it is possible not not yet implemented.

[Rotech]

In my 2nd home I have Ap800 connected to HS. My experience has been a 85% success in VR with open air mics. But when it get noisy it reduces to 45% accuracy, but over all it's very cool, it will come the time that this will get 100%, can't wait......

[dschoppe]

I was using VR over the phone previously, but since moving HS to a new Win7x64 PC, it hasn't worked at all (as in it recognizes almost nothing). At some point I'll get around to debugging it...