HAI Voice Module

[PaulD]

Just installed a HAI "Two-Way Audio/Voice Alarm Module" in a OPII setup. I am using it to make event announcements (aka...page) thru the HAI HiFi system. If the HiFi is already active (playing music), it works OK. However, if it is not already active, the announcement typically starts with the second or third word of the phrase in the announcement. It acts as if the HiFi is slow to "wake up" in time to handle the first words in the phrase being sent by the voice module.
I have some thoughts on how to wake up the HiFi before the announcement is sent but I do not think I should need to do that. I would expect that "hand shaking" process to be handled by the OPII rather than me doing it. Anyone else experience this behavior? How did you deal with it?

 

[PaulD]

Update on my work around. If anyone has a better workaround, I would like to hear about it.

My announcements now consist of a trigger followed by 2 sequential announcements. The first phrase is a single word like "Alert". The second phrase is the actual phrase I want to announce like "Front Door Not Secure". With this arrangement, if the HiFi is already on, I hear both phrases with a tiny pause in between them. If the HiFi is not already on, I only hear the second phrase. Apparently when the HiFi is off, the first single word phrase gets passed to the HiFi before it is fully awake and is never heard over the speakers. Not what I would expect from the system but this work around gets the job done.

 

[HAI_fjh]

What happens is the voice board asserts the trigger, waits a short time for the amplifier to "warm up" then sends the voice words. In initial testing it worked great. The problem is that the amount of time it takes for an amplifier to "warm up" is variable and sometimes can be quite long. This goes for the Hi-Fi and all other amplifiers we have tested. After it had been out for a while we discovered that when some amplifiers were off there was still a problem with dropping the first word. To address this the delay time was increased in the next firmware release. Again in testing it worked great. Again in the field some users reported problems.

After much more extensive testing we discovered that there were many variables that affect the warm up time. The current built in delay works well in most cases but if doesn't work in your environment there is a relatively simple solution.

I would suggest creating a warmup message "WarmUpPause" whose voice words consist of nothing but pauses. Use it like this:

WHEN some event
THEN SAY WarmUpPause
THEN SAY The Real Message

Now I have seen several suggestions like add a pause or beep to the beginning of all your messages. This may work but then you loose a word from each message. For some amps, one pause is not enough and then there's the problem you mentioned that sometimes you here it and sometimes you don't. By using the separate warmup message you can add 2 or even 3 pauses if necessary without reducing the number of words available to your messages. Also if you find out that on a cold morning (yes temperature is a factor) your amp needs a little more time you only have to adjust the one "WarmUpPause" message to add more or less delay.

This is really the best solution because you can get exactly the delay you need in your environment.

I hope this helps.

 

[ASIHome]

If you are using a less than 4 word phrase you could insert a --Beep--, --Beep-- in front of the phrase.

 

[PaulD]

I would suggest creating a warmup message "WarmUpPause" whose voice words consist of nothing but pauses.

I will experiment with this. At least this confirms that I am not doing anything wrong in my setup.

First thing this AM, I tried it and I lost the first phrase (one word) as well as the first two words out of four in the second phrase. It would not suprise me for this to happen on a third party amplifier system but I did not expect it from HAI's own HiFi. The down side of the warm up process is that messages would not be announced until after a noticeable delay following the action that triggered the message.