(no subject)

[prog]

Cleaning again, getting to the last few boxes under the bed, stuffed there after the move. And it occurs to me that I want to be able have the following conversation with my house:

O House?
Yes, my son?
Where does the flashlight go?
The flashlight goes in Junk Drawer Three.
What is Junk Drawer Three?
Junk Drawer Three is in the kitchen, under the cupboard, second drawer from the left.
Thanks.
Aye aye.
O House?
Morning, sir.
Where does the whiteboard eraser go?
I don't know.
The whiteboard eraser goes into the top desk drawer.
OK, the whiteboard eraser goes into the top desk drawer.
Thanks.
Live to serve.

Surely the technology exists to make this happen. I want to know what sorts of speech-recognition software exists for Mac OS X (I used to know... hee hee, I get to look up stuff in MOSXiaN again; I love doing that), and how one might build an interface between that and Perl. Then it's just a matter of clever mic-and-speaker arrangement. Well, and buying a dedicated computer, but.

Comments

[poetgeek.livejournal.com]

RFID? Ultrasonic transducers on _everything_ [Think ORL ActiveBat (follow on project to the ActiveBadges)]? I was the position on objects to be retrievable without having to have told the object to tell the house there it is (or w/out telling the house directly).

"O House - locate car keys - open garage door"

I'd have the responses from the house to the greetings, overloaded with meaning. Might as well overload the greetings too. House-macros.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I thought about RFID too, but AFAIK this isn't something I can implement right now, at least not at a sub-prohibitive cost (correct me if I'm wrong).

Done more thinking and quick research in the hours since posting this, and have thought some interesting ideas. I'm pretty sure some of them overlap with what others may have written about 'smart houses', but mostly I'm now quite curious about the experience of having mics and speakers throughout one's physical space (my apartment, in this case), connected to a computer that is always listening, and might pipe up by itself when interesting things occur (alarm clock, new LJ friend post, etc... which it can then elaborate on with a spoken command). I guess I'm thinking about using 'smart house' stuff for information management instead of the 'usual' lights-and-doors stuff that the geekerati have been playing with for years.

I may have more coherently stated thoughts after all this settles. :)

hmm.

[jadelennox]

I talk to my computer at all times, including at the moment, with a mic strapped to my head. If the boom is at a slightly off angle -- say, 3 mm further from my head -- recognition goes to crap. And that's with the best retail recognition product on the market, which is *not* available for mic. Then again, house management requires a much smaller vocabulary, so recognition is easier. But OS X is so far from the forefront of speech recognition tech that I simply can't use it.

Re: hmm.

[jadelennox]

not available for mac, not for mic.

On the back end...

[cnoocy]

have you looked at infobot? Your house conversation sounds a lot like the conversations we would have with our house infobot at my last job.

Re: On the back end...

[prog.livejournal.com]

I was actually thinking about Alex the Parrot, whom I remembered well from my IFMud days. I spent much of Friday evening messing around with his source code, actually.

It doesn't surprise me to learn that other, similar (and probably more versatile) info-base of things of this variety exist. I figure that setting up this software would be the "easy" part of this system, anyway...

Thanks for the link!

[ts52.livejournal.com]

I don't think the voice recognition software out there for Mac OS X is that good yet. But if you find some, let me know, so I can pass it along to my dad.