Skype + VR + Virtual Audio Cable

[travisdh]

Hi All,

Sorry for the general broadcast, not that long ago i saw mention of someone using the inbuilt capabilities of the Homeseer Speaker with Skype by using Virtual Audio Cable as a conduit, with quite good success and cant seem to find the port, nor more details.

Hoping that person can come forward, I would love to get more information about how you did it, which settings you had, which virtual audio cable (product) you used, and how you linked Skype to Homeseer Speaker (did you have to change default audio recording device?

Anyways id love to try and replicate your setup as being able to Skype / SIP the homeseer server, and have native voice recognition would be a HUGE WAF booster in my household.

Thanks for coming forward!

Thanks everyone for your time

[sharrisct25]

Mixed reviews here

First let me say that I have been unable to get this to work at all in a 64bit Windows 7 machine. I have gotten it to function on a 32bit install but I have yet to get it to really work.

The fact seems to be that there is a significant lag in the audio and the microsoft VR itself seems to have a hard time with the audio patch. I have tried two different phones and calls via wifi, cabled, and GSM all seem to have around the same results. I can say that this does not seem to be a issue with Homeseer but I have run into a few times where I think the skype plug ins voice commands may have collided with normal HS VR. I feel that the big issue is really how the MS speech engine deals with the patch because regular training has problems as does normal MS voice commands without HS. I have tried this same approach with a machine running dragon naturally speaking and it seems to be better so that has furthered my suspicious it is the MS engine.

Now I have read others are using this so perhaps they speak more clearly than I or are using Windows XP which I have heard has a better or more forgiving TTS engine.

Net net in my experiance this is not really a useable shortcut for this need. I may try windows xp but I will likely hold out for HS to develop a direct push to talk type function into the mobile clients. Hopefully that would have better results.

[sharrisct25]

XP is no better

Actually it might be worse because the voice recognition worked only occasionally. In fact now that I am back on Windows 7 for some reason it has stopped working there.

Really it is too bad that this is so unreliable because having it working right would be really cool.

[sharrisct25]

An alternative option

I found a app just released recently called WO Mic google site here http://sites.google.com/site/wovirtualmic/

This is a driver for your PC and a client that connects to the compainon app on the android phone via wifi, bluetooth, or USB and lets the phone look just like a mic to the pc. I have tried it and it works very well with homeseer thus far.

The problem is that the connection is inverse to what we would want it to be. THe PC should be the server idle waiting for the app to be started on the phone not the way it is now where the phone is the server.

I have emailed the developer and have my fingers crossed he may be able to tell me how to change that. If I can get it working with the PC as the server I will be using this alot!