Just so you guys know, voice control can (and has!) been done. Voice control isnt rocket science, and Microsoft's newest SDK's make it even easier. (I know, I know, I hate Microsoft too, but what can I say, it was the best/easiest thing out when I was writing my plugin (see above post from smashr).
"Voice recognition, involve tons of cpu power. Imagine for a minute you have a song playing, it will pick up that sound and tries to process it, mind you this might go on for a long time, thus your command WILL never get processed. "
That is not true at all. On my 800Mhz (which maybe used to be top of the line, not so much anymore) - I saw the response of voice commands almost instantly, with >90% accuracy. In a car I had maybe 80-85% accuracy, with a 1-2 second latency on the commands, not bad when you think about it.
In case you don't believe me, I will rant some more. For those of you who are convinced, you can just stop reading here. (Oh and by the way Charles Enwesi, what exactly is "Day 1"?)
First of all, any decent programmer will think of a solution to background noise (i.e. music). My straightforward (perhaps not the best) solution was to turn down the volume of playback automatically when a command is recognized. And no, it doesnt turn down its volume every other second everytime somebody says something. It only turns down the volume on recieving a wake up command (which can be set by the user). Ideally this command should be something that is easy to say and recognize, yet not something said frequently in every day conversation. (I have found "Computer" to work fairly well...). Upon recieving the command, the plugin turns the volume back up.
Second, the speed/quality of the computer SHOULD NOT be an issue. Smashr (see above) had a plugin called VoodooVoice running on his K6-2 400Mhz laptop (64MB RAM) a long time ago with around 85% accuracy. We had my plugin running on a BookPC, as well as our "CoolPC" (a substition we built to the BookPC, which didnt work right). I mean heck, you cant hardly buy a decent computer under 800 or so Mhz any more! And if your building your own, a K6-2 450 is only $25 dollars on pricewatch.com!
Third, the issue of a microphone shouldnt really be an issue at all. With a $10 headset microphone I bought at Radioshack (the headset part cut off, leaving just the microphone), I achieved almost maximum accuracy from over 10 feet away (the same results as someone earlier on this post ...) In a car, this microphone can be mounted on the sun visor thingie, and thus is only a foot or two from the speakers mouth, and out of the way.
Basically Ive lost my train of thought, but for anyone that still thinks voice control doesnt work in a car, email me at kevmo@kevmotech.com and I will provide a longer, more in depth review showing how and why it works (if I can find the report me and smashr and mellman wrote ....)
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- Experience varies directly with equipment broken ---------- Kevmo
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