Hey Keith - I'm the crazy lunatic who has been using Voicebot to automate my theater. It has actually begun to "leak out" of the theater and I'm starting to plan out a more robust implementation in multiple rooms.
I'm copying my responses to your comment on my steam review because Steam actually has a character limit.
I know that the Kinect suggestion is a pretty big distraction, and I'm sure you've got a backlog of features you want to implement. I know that there's a ton of pent-up demand for utilizing these cheap stereo sensors ($25 and readily available) and microphone arrays for automation and nobody has really stepped in to do it. Even just using it for the microphone and occupancy detection (SDK and toolkit have skeletal detection for sitting and standing modes, acoustic echo cancellation, room mapping) you could have it lock the system when you walk away - dim lights when you enter a room - you name it.
Just a thought! Keep up the great work, Voicebot is a pleasure to use!
(Originally Posted on Steam) Hi Keith! I actually wrote in a week or so ago about providing an option where Voicebot will pause listening during TTS events. Even if it was a simple checkbox to pause listening while a specific sequence is in-progress would work great! Pausing the listening during TTS events would be two fold. One is that longer TTS readbacks wouldn't accidentally trigger another macro - the other is that I have a sneaking suspicion that the microsoft learning engine is hearing the TTS voice and modifying the profile against the TTS voice. This could weaken the strength and efficiency of the detection and negate the benefit of training the engine with the learning feature.
The ability to run a command-line prompt/argument would be a great macro addition. Right now I have to tell it to launch an application, browse the directory, change the option from .exe/.bin to "All Files" and then select a .bat file. On top of all that - when Voicebot launches the BAT file, the starting directory is it's own application directory in Program Files. All my batch scripts have to start with a change-directory command to send it back to the command line app's base directory before executing it.
Also - Kinect SDK integration for high quality microphone input (or even gesture control with gaming). The Kinect SDK allows for the Kinect to do beamforming microphone input as well as acoustic echo cancellation (cancelling the sound output against the microphone input to better hear commands over game/movie noise). The SDK and Toolkit has a crap-ton of C#, VB, and C++ code samples for this stuff. Kinects are dirt-cheap these days (got my 360 Kinect at Gamestop for $25).
[Edit] Might also be a good feature to allow for scheduled sync timers so if I have "endpoints" that sync my profiles against eachother, I can have them do so once an hour or so without my having to intervene.
We'll definitely put these items on our list for further investigation, and if we're able to implement them in a future version, I'll be sure to let you know.
We'll definitely put these items on our list for further investigation, and if we're able to implement them in a future version, I'll be sure to let you know.
Thanks!
For what it's worth, I would happily pay 2-3x as much for a home automation-specific version of VoiceBot!
Keep up the great work, Voicebot is a pleasure to use!
