fun with teamspeak

[damage]

back when i bought my house, i had the place wired w/ cat-5 & rg-6, but never thought about running wires for microphones. a year ago, i got a copy of HAL deluxe from lowes for $9 & have only been using it for the telephony and voice recognition over telephone. last weekend, i was playing around w/ this software called teamspeak ( http://www.goteamspeak.com ). it's a voip type software that is used mainly by people playing networked multiplayer games - allowing them to talk to their teammates across a network.

i installed it on my HA machine & added another sound card to the system for teamspeak to use. i wired the line out of that soundcard to the mic in of the soundcard for HAL. i installed a mic & teamspeak on a desktop & started tweaking mic levels and the teamspeak settings. so now i can speak voice commands into the desktop mic, have them digitized & sent across my LAN to my HA server, which converts them back to analog, sends them through the line out of 1 soundcard into the mic input of the other soundcard & HAL can recognize my commands there is a slight lag (about 1 second or so), due to the teamspeak encoding/decoding, before HAL responds but other than that it works pretty well. you can scale the free version up to 16 clients.

now to find some better microphones.

 

[electron]

That's pretty cool, I gave up on VR because I could not get it to work right due to the long distances. Since I have a computer in each important room, this could fix the issue. Thanks for the tip, I am going to give this a try!

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

If I am remembering Tink's explanation at the Jan CES correctly, if you are upgrading to Homeseer 2.0 you can do this as well (use desktop mics to send VR commands back to the Homeseer server). You can also send sound output to the desktop from the HS box as well.

 

[damage]

If I am remembering Tink's explanation at the Jan CES correctly, if you are upgrading to Homeseer 2.0 you can do this as well (use desktop mics to send VR commands back to the Homeseer server). You can also send sound output to the desktop from the HS box as well.

that reminded me that the there is already an xpl app to do that

see xpl voice on http://www.xplhal.com/xpl_vb6.htm
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ukha_xpl/message/1025

since i've already got xpl going, i'm going to try this out as well.

i already use xpl tts to send tts to specific machines on my network.

 

[damage]

i've been playing around w/ xpl voice and it's working out much better than the teamspeak hack i started with. it uses sapi 5.1 for voice recognition and can be installed on every machine you want to have VR.

so far i've got it set up on one machine. i've set up, what are basically menus of commands which narrow down what voice commands can be used. the main menu lets you choose a mode (referred to as 'context' in xpl voice doc), like lighting or stereo control. each of those has a list of available commands, like kitchen light on or volume down, etc.

so the VR is done on the local machine & a command is sent across the network to xplhal. i have an xplhal script that acts on the commands from xpl voice by running other scripts or connecting to starCom to do IR, X10, etc.

i didn't really see any info on xpl here (i did see xap), so if anyone's curious about it you should check out http://www.xplproject.org.uk

instructions to set up an xpl environment
http://www.xplproject.org.uk/modules.php?o...artid=31&page=1

xpl yahoo group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ukha_xpl

lots of xpl apps
http://www.xplhal.com

i plan on putting sample code for my xpl voice setup on my website if anyone's interested.