myVoice Open Beta (2 Viewers)

[Bram]

I've used this wonderful plugin before, but I've stopped using it because I could not give the plugin a command to make it stop listening to input.
When I was talking with people I always had to make people to shut up until the plugin automatically stopped tracking the input of the microphone (timed out), otherwise MP would start doing random stuff.
One more difficulty is that when music or a movie is playing the mic sometimes recognized the sound of the music/movie as my voice and started doing random stuff.

Is there a command to make the plugin stop listening now?
Also, it would be nice be able to do something like.. "Computer - Music - Directory - Pink Floyd", if this would cause MP to open the directory called "Pink Floyd". This would make issuing commands much more impulsive. I do understand this could get a bit to complicated. Because sometimes there are several bands with the same album name.

 

[booyakasha]

Hi Bram,

Yes there's a deactivation phrase. Has been for quite a while now. It'll also stop listening automatically after a user-configurable time.

As for your second problem of it just randomly picking up stuff, that can still be somewhat of an issue depending what's going on. I've found that command phrases with multiple words get around this somewhat, so instead of saying "up" you say "move up". I think there's less of a chance that someone in a movie says those words. Also, if your PC is fast enough (which I think yours is), you can try turning up the recognition engine accuracy in the control panel.

As for the music directory thing, this is something I want to get to at some point, included with an interactive search, so you can search for part of a song name, album name, etc. I have to learn a lot more about MediaPortal's interface to implement something like this though. It does respond to artist selection by the way, so you can say "Music Artist Pink Floyd" and it will generate a playlist of all your Pink Floyd songs and start playing.

 

[Bram]

Thank you for the clear response and thank you for this great plugin. I'm going to give it another try!

 

[Marcusb]

hey there, glad to see more enhancements
Bram -for the issue of the PC responding to regular conversations, this is something that will happen with a room mounted mic vs one on your person.
A few things I have done to improve this
- pick an activation phrase that is pretty unique. It's best to give the PC a name, since "computer" can come up in conversation.
- spend a lot of time training the PC and DEFINATELY make sure "adaptive learning" is turned off in the MS speech settings. This is one time where you don't want the PC to be learning by listening to the TV.
- set the time out time to be quite short. I set mine for four seconds, which is short enough not to be a problem with mistaken activations.
- make sure the activation phrase has a plus in front of it. This signifies a more certain signal is needed to activate the engine.

One feature request I have:
It's pretty gimmicky and may be hard with the MS speech engine, but is it possible to have a command where the PC will repeat what you say? for example, you can say "Say hello to XXX" and the PC will then say "Hello XXX".

Also, the voice I am now using is Callie from a company called cepstral. IT's actually very lifelike and only cost US$29. I may have already said this, sorry if I did

and for a really off the wall request - Do you know of any way to access the voice engine remotely?
If my housemate is watching TV, I'd like to be able to access a service from a different PC that will let me type in something for the PC to say. I figure I could have loads of fun with something like that. I'm guessing the only way would be to use a web service though. Any ideas?

I'm in Mexico at the moment, but will load up the new version when I get home.

 

[booyakasha]

Hey Marcus,

Thanks for clarifying the mic/voice issues a little more.
As for your requests, the first one I think is do-able in the engine itself, but not in the plugin at the moment. I'd have to use the dictation part of the engine, which I haven't got to yet. That'll come when I do the searches etc, so I'll keep it in mind when I get there. As for the second request, I'm not sure at all how to implement that. Are you wanting to surprise the viewers of your TV while you're away? In all honesty, I'm not sure when I'd get around to that. If I start playing around with web-services or something like that, I'll let you know, and I'll use that idea as a stand-alone app.

Hope you're having a good time in Mexico.

 

[Marcusb]

hey, thanks for the response.
Glad to hear the firs thing is doable. Thanks for keeping it in mind.

For the second, I was also wondering if you had come across anything built in to the MS engine itself that could be used.
The voice I am using now comes with a tool application that can speak in response to a command line prompt but haven't been able to work out a way to do this from a remote computer yet. I figure MS aren't imaginative enough to think of uses like that for their engine though.

 

[mpfrank]

Hi guys,

can this plugin be used with Windows Vista Ultimate 32-Bit too?

Cheers
mpFrank

 

[booyakasha]

can this plugin be used with Windows Vista Ultimate 32-Bit too?

I have no idea, but would be curious to know. I think that if you have the MS Speech engine it should be fine. It works with engines 5.1 and 6.1 (the one that comes with MS Office 2003), but I'm unsure as to whether they've change speech engines for Vista. You can find out what engine you're using by going to Control Panel->Speech and it'll be in the Language drop-down (instructions are for XP btw, as I don't know the Vista equivalent).

 

[dukus]

Why not make a MPI package ?

 

[booyakasha]

Why not make a MPI package ?

I noticed it too late, but I will work on setting up an install with it.