Has anybody actually gotten VR to work?

[ewkearns]

Has anybody actually gotten VR to work? When I say the house name, it doesn't reply, "Yes," as it should. Almost NEVER does it understand anything I say. Crummy microphone? Nut behind the wheel? I dunno.

What did you do right, that I am doing wrong?

[Rupp]

Have you trained the VR profile using the control panel > speech recognition. You can test your mic by recording a message using the Accessories > Sound Recorder on Windows 7 and most other OS's

[ewkearns]

I've tried, but unless the microphone is nearly jammed down my throat, it doesn't hear what I say clearly enough to register.

Obviously, I'd like to be heard most anywhere in the room, rather than get up and speak into the mic....

[ORNVM]

i'd say it is your microphone. I've heard good things about the microphones in the kinect doing well over a large room. Personally, i've done with a push to talk app on my phone connected to the HS3 PC, so i can just VR from my phone anytime, gets rid of the problem of being close to a mic, etc., and as a bonus i can fire commands from anywhere since the PTT audio rides any network back to the HS3 pc.

[Rupp]

You will need a high quaility open air mic like the Acoustic Magic :
http://www.amazon.com/Acoustic-Magic...ray+microphone

You should also check out the Kinect plugin which work very well with inexpensive Kinect hardware. This has been proven to work very well.
Check out this thread that includes a video of a user using this setup:
http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=172141

[ewkearns]

Personally, i've done with a push to talk app on my phone connected to the HS3 PC, so i can just VR from my phone anytime, gets rid of the problem of being close to a mic, etc., and as a bonus i can fire commands from anywhere since the PTT audio rides any network back to the HS3 pc.

That sounds more doable than what I'm reading about microphones.... which app do you use?

[ORNVM]

That sounds more doable than what I'm reading about microphones.... which app do you use?

I use Zello@work

https://zello.com/work.htm


Its free for up to 5 accounts, so the HS server + 4 remote clients can be setup this way at no cost, and its completely private.

I use a virtual audio cable to route zello's audio output to windows VR input, and HS Speaker client out to zello's mic.

I setup PTT by Vox on the PC side, so when a text to speech event fires, that comes through on my phone too.

Its really important to spend some time and re-train the windows VR agent using the PTT app as your source, read the training lines through your phone or whatever device you're going to be using, and then its pretty darn reliable. I'd say i have better than 95% recognition of all my commands doing this way, and i absolutely love getting TTS announcements back over my phone from wherever i'm at, walking around outside, or across town, etc.

[ORNVM]

there was also someone else doing this with skype, but not sure if they kept a persistent call going or what. That was the reason i went with zello, the build up and tear down of the audio channel is really fast, and isn't very bandwidth intensive.

[TomTom]

I'm about to do my VR setup with a XAP800 and the methods below seemed to have advantages over other VR setups. I can't remember them all now, but the author(AshaiRey) of the first link could probably explain. And Blade has started a plugin for XAP800 and AshaiRey is in the process of converting his HS2 XAP800 script to HS3. The initial setup takes time, but the results seems to be very good and reliable. AshaiRey is the VR guru and probably tell you all the ins and outs.

ZMC v3 Whole house audio system on the cheap


BLAudioMatrix

[TomTom]

I use Zello@work

https://zello.com/work.htm


Its free for up to 5 accounts, so the HS server + 4 remote clients can be setup this way at no cost, and its completely private.

I use a virtual audio cable to route zello's audio output to windows VR input, and HS Speaker client out to zello's mic.

I setup PTT by Vox on the PC side, so when a text to speech event fires, that comes through on my phone too.

Its really important to spend some time and re-train the windows VR agent using the PTT app as your source, read the training lines through your phone or whatever device you're going to be using, and then its pretty darn reliable. I'd say i have better than 95% recognition of all my commands doing this way, and i absolutely love getting TTS announcements back over my phone from wherever i'm at, walking around outside, or across town, etc.

How much delay(in seconds if any) is there in spoken command to execution of HS action using this setup(zello).

[LeoS]

How much delay(in seconds if any) is there in spoken command to execution of HS action using this setup(zello).

I've just set it up. The connection between zello client and your HS3 server is pretty much instant, probably the difference is the (less than 0.5 second) of pressing the PTT button and it beeping when you want to send commands to it.

[cheeryfool]

I've just set it up. The connection between zello client and your HS3 server is pretty much instant, probably the difference is the (less than 0.5 second) of pressing the PTT button and it beeping when you want to send commands to it.

Leo

Did you use Virtual Audio Cable to hook together the Zello client with HS? It seemed a little 'iffy' when I took a look last weekend?

Cheers
James

[LeoS]

Leo

Did you use Virtual Audio Cable to hook together the Zello client with HS? It seemed a little 'iffy' when I took a look last weekend?

Cheers
James

Yes, I did. How do you mean iffy?

[ORNVM]

Leo
Did you use Virtual Audio Cable to hook together the Zello client with HS?

I used a virtual audio cable called VB Cable to do the patch both ways. It is donation-ware to get more than 1 audio path at a time.

Zello can bind to any audio card or usb audio device that windows detects, so you could set it up on an auxiliary sound card or physically loop back audio if you wanted to.

really small audio delay on zello. on TTS announcements between the live local speaker in my whole house audio and the zello app on my phone maybe 1-2 seconds max. it sounds like a echo for most of my short announcements:
live speaker: front door open [zello]beep beep, front door open...

[cheeryfool]

Thanks guys. The one I found was called "Virtual Audio Cable" and it didn't get good reviews. The whole thing looked very sketchy and of course that makes me think of malware etc.

I'll give VB Cable a go.

Cheers