Did you ever try your intercom idea? I don’t see why that wouldn’t work as long as the speakers were clear enough. I have had the “Star Trek” ideas about walking through the house and operating every appliance with voice commands too, but I don’t know if it’s realistic. I know it can be done but the circumstances to make it work correctly are extreme.
I assume the intercom your proposing is push button, meaning you walk up to the intercom, push a button to turn the mic on and then speak into it at a very close range. If you did your modifications and wired the intercom directly into the computer, with some adjusting and trial and error, that should work well.
If you do as the other guy suggested and put your mic by a intercom speaker, that should also work as long as the area where the mic is located is always quiet. Which brings us to the pitfall of voice commands.
In order for any voice command or voice recognition software to work, your voice can be the only sound entering the microphone. Software can not distinguish the difference between voices and any other noise and in turn tries to identify commands from any noise it hears. Things like music, another person talking, a dishwasher running or a fan blowing air across the mic will interfere with the recognition. If your giving commands while any other noise is being made the computer thinks that it is hearing one combined sound and can not distinguish the voice from the noise.
I am experimenting with voice commands and active home now, in hopes of installing a house wide system while remodeling my house. I am using a fairly high quality mic/mixer/soundcard combo which I use for recording music. It is an Audio Technica condenser mic ran through a behringer mixer and that goes through a M-Audio Delta 1010 computer interface. I am getting incredible results with voice recognition with the microphone across the room which suggest that if I had mics in other rooms plugged into other channels of the mixer I would have control from other rooms the same as from here (my bedroom).
That does not work, again because of the background noise. Any open mic picks up a certain amount of noise even in a quiet room, this is called white noise, you may have heard about it from the movie, it’s what most people think is silence. Several mics combing white noise into the mixer creates a loud background noise to the software, which again ruins speech recognition. There is a way to try to combat this effect.
A tool we commonly use in the audio industry is a “noise gate” which does just what it sounds like it would do, it closes a gate or turns a mic off to keep noise from coming through. The gate is opened when a sound gets above a certain volume. A threshold level is used to adjust the gate to open at the optimum level. This simulates some one turning on only the mic in the room your giving commands in. In a quiet environment this would, in theory anyway, work well. But in reality it will only work if for instance your wife isn’t in the other room vacuuming. Then the noise of the vacuum would open the gate in that room and confuse the voice recognition.
I am using “Realize Voice” instead of “BXVC” because I use it for more than just “Active Home”. If you only want to control Active Home, BXVC is incredible. I also use it to check email, play games, open other programs and to some extent navigate through windows and the web. This brings up another concern which I may put in another post. If anyone knows a good way the interface Active Home and Realize Voice I would appreciate some advice. The only way I can figure to do it is to simply record keyboard and mouse clicks. This is not very efficient and relies on the icons in Active Home to be in the same place always.
Anyway, the reason I bring that up is because Realize Voice has a pause mode (don’t know if BXVC does or not) which lets you stop voice recognition, with a voice command, in a noisy environment except for listening for one specific command which un-pauses. It can also be set to pause after a length of time with no voice recognition and it also seems to pause itself when there is too much background noise. This allows you to have voice command active all the time but paused when it’s too noisy. To use voice recognition after it’s been paused you have to first use the “Wake Up” command and then the command of your choice.
After all is said and done, we should be able to make our home appliances in every room respond to voice commands but it still is dependant on having a quiet environment.
Hope I have been of some help.
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Topic: BXVC (Bill's X10 Voice Commander) (JScript version) (Read 357263 times)