BrownieMan

Right now I'm doing the research and some coding to develop an app that strictly uses sound, so no visual display.

I like this idea for a few reasons.

1) It's much cheaper since you don't have to buy a display
2) You don't have to worry about theft as much, since there is no display to entice thieves
3) It's pretty impressive
4) You never have to worry about getting tickets (I've heard that it might be illegal to have a display in the driver's live of sight).
5) It's much safer than looking down and touching a display


I'm going to be writing this thing in VB and is only in the design and prototype phase.


Realistic ideas so far:
1) Audio/media application
2) Car Diagnostics via OBD-II
3) GPS (I'm not that great that I can code a mapper from scratch, does anyone know an open source VB(.NET) mapper that I can use?)
3a) memorizng speed traps and other other things (wifi?)
4) Phone dialing and manipulation (likewise, I think I'll need something open source to "steal" from)
5) PDA functions
5a) contacts (ie. "What is John Smith's address?")
5b) schedule (ie. "What are my plans for today?")
6) note taking


Does anyone have any comments or things they would like to see, or hear?

karrhacker

I hate to be negative but I tried this a few years back, (not sure it the software has changed any or not) but it really doesn't work well.. With the combination of road noise, interior noise and wind noise (unless you car is like a coffin inside) it makes it almost impossible for the computer to recognize what you are saying. Then there is the HUGE amount of data the you have to load into memory for commands such as "PLAY Shakira-Oral Fixation, Volume 2 How Do You Do" ..

As for it being illegal for the displays to be in the line of sight of the driver, well how would we use the GPS systems? or Radio functions, as many car manufacturers are starting to use large touch screens instead of the old 2" radios.

But good luck with everything, and let use know how you make out..

BrownieMan

well, I already have voice recognition working very well. On my desktop at home it says Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) uses 3% of my processor (AMD 3200?), so that's probably at most 100mhz processing power on an intel or similar processor. It also uses about 50MB of RAM. This is on idle right now though, I'll have to check later when I'm actually using DNS.

I have the program just ype whatever I'm saying into a text field. After each time I stop talking (don't ask me how DNS does it exactly, a timer or lull in sound maybe?) the field resets itself. After that it's just a matter of parsing the words. If int eh sentence it sees the word PLAY, it knows to switch to audio mode and try and search for a file called whatever was after the word play. DNS is the only thing that really requires a lot of processing power, everything else is pretty trivial.


As for the legality thing, I think you will see more enforcement of it or regulation of GPS's and touchscreens in cars when they are in EVERY car like cell phones are.

karrhacker

Have you tried using the MS Voice SDK? Very simple to use.. I personally have never used DNS....

BrownieMan

hmm, no. I'll have to look into it.