CQC 'quick start' tutorials

CQC is a very powerful product, and that causes a lot of folks to think that it is something that they'd never figure out. But we understand that it has a learning curve and have always had a 'quick start' scheme to help you get a fairly nice setup without any need to dig into CQC's hard core customization features.
 
Here is a Youtube playlist that demonstrates what is involved. This one picks up after the first few videos of the main playlist, which shows you how to install CQC, do some basic setup, and how to install device drivers. At that point you can use the quick start scheme to generate a nice set of touch screens in multiple resolutions and for multiple rooms. You don't need to watch the other videos in order to go through these and get a feel for what is involved.
 
https://   www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLJojk5z5q10RZKzxzyBlNI8VktL4uEls2&v=gWK4GwDO7bA
 
* I had to 'break' the URL above because the forum software doesn't seem to allow you to post a playlist, it just embeds the first video. Remove the spaces to get the actual URL.
 
 
Though it's not officially released yet, this will also get you nice, all local, voice control over these same features using our new Jarvis feature, which we currently have released to our existing customers for evaluation and feedback. Once it is ready to go, you can have very nice voice control as well. Here is a quick and dirty preview video of how the voice control works:
 
http://www.charmedquark.com/Web2/PostImages/5_1Previews/JarvisPreview2.mp4
 
It's far more conversational and natural than the Echo can provide, though we support the Echo as well if you want to use that. But the automatic support for the 'quick start' functionality is only supported via the Kinect 2.0 Sensor, because it allows us to support the kind of back and forth that you hear in the example video above.

The voice demo impresses me every time I watch it. I think it changes the whole character of interacting with the system. Also makes Alexa and Google Voice look a little primitive by comparison.

Voice control is still very much on the hairy edge. There are compromises no matter which way you go. But, getting away from the cloud, and having total local control of the process, which allows for a conversational style, really makes it much closer to how voice control is presented in movies and books and therefore how people would tend to want them to be. The Echo/GHome type products are using their huge back-end power to do untrained recognition of a small number of words. They still get it wrong more than would be hoped, but it does allow for certain things that can't be so easily done otherwise. At our end of the spectrum, we give up that capability because there's not enough fire power (the grammar is fixed, though we dynamically update it based on your system configuration before we fix it.) But, in return we get control over the whole process, so it's not just a voice driven remote control.
 
Someone really needs to hunker down and create a PCI-e card with a butt load of DSP power that will allow for extremely accurate voice recognition (given the input from a mic array) and the ability to do untrained recognition with good accuracy, given just some basic training. In order to do that it would have to provide voice identification, so that it could use the training data for the person speaking. That would have really significant benefits as well, because the system could then know who it was talking to which would allow for privileged commands to be done via voice control.