voice recognition (sp?)

blaine1605 · 07-07-2001, 12:15 PM

Has anyone gotten voice recognition to work. Right now im working on my first "car-puter" and am going to implement voice recogniton through a third party program, but was wondering if anyone had any winamp plugins that would be better

and right now my voice recognition system is limited to the simple commands such as "play song" "stop" and "skip" etc.

Adam F · 07-07-2001, 03:44 PM

If you think about it, how well would voice recognition work while music is playing? You would have to shout over the music which would increse the inacurracy of the recognition, and the music in the background would interfear also. That is, unless you wear a headset mic while driving

cenwesi · 07-07-2001, 03:51 PM

Adam F said it better. I have said this from DAY one(1) it just WONT work, i dont care what other ppl tell u. Really think about it, you have music going on in the bacground, not to mention outside noise + engine noise....
Even if you do get it to work, you might need to cut off the sound/mp3 then issue the command. Now here is another thing ppl dont think about...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. I can go on and on, but let me be quite....

Take it from me, i dont think todays technology is ready for voice yet, it is a totally diff ball game especially in our case.

blaine1605 · 07-07-2001, 06:47 PM

actually.. i've gotten the voice recognition to work, while being 10 feet away, sure i have to raise my voice a little it'll follow my command, and this was while the music was cranked up on my home pc.

i mean.. i don't want to sound like a concietied newbie... but yeah

[ 07-07-2001: Message edited by: blaine ]

cenwesi · 07-07-2001, 09:43 PM

Quote:

and this was while the music was cranked up on my home pc.

lol...go try it in the car and come tell me what happens. Doing it at home and doing it in the car are two diff things.

blaine1605 · 07-07-2001, 09:49 PM

true that...

i'll have to see...

ppgt94 · 07-08-2001, 01:18 AM

Grrrr...I'm sorry, but this topic fires me up when people say it' WON'T WORK. Because I HAVE DONE IT..with an extremely high success rate. Near 95%. Despite the theory of extensive background noice interferance. I have had it work with music at normal levels. It worked great. If you don't believe me go to your local car stereo shop and test out a Clarion AutoPC.

wizardPC · 07-08-2001, 10:55 AM

Clarion AutoPC != BookPC (or any other computer, for that matter)

the autoPC is very specialized. The software out there for consumers is NOT what is in that. the AutoPC may work, and individuals may have varying results with voice, but no one should blanket generalize it as good or bad

ppgt94 · 07-08-2001, 01:05 PM

The Clarion AutoPC, or now what is known as the "Joyride", uses Windows CE. I'm not blanketing and saying that every type of application people attempt at VR will work, but you people often make it sound like it is an impossible task.

If you ask me, ANYTHING is possible, depending on how hard you try and how bad you want it. Getting VR to work is not a miraculous feat, and can easily be done sucessfully. All this huff and puff about background noise is hypothetical, I've not seen anyone actually try this and not have success.

About the comment about having varying success rates with the autopc; Let me just note that I've installed it in three different cars. A '94 Ford Probe GT, a '97 Audi a4, and my current Acura Integra. I recently sold the autopc and the buyer also claims to have great results. So it doesn't vary incredibly, if you install by manufactures suggestions.

Please also make it aware that I am not out to bash anyone or flame. I just get upset when people are so discouraging. Especially with the fact that many who do have probably not even tried such a thing. So I appologize if I come off as [add synonym for extremely rude person]. Thanks.

JamesB · 07-09-2001, 08:56 AM

OK, those who say voice rec. will not/never work need to read up on how such software works.

The quick and dirty is that voice recognition CAN and WILL work over music is due to the processing of the voice input. With better (more advanced) voice recognition software (and hardware for that matter) you are able to specify (and in some cases select) a noise floor .. this covers sounds that will be constant under operating parameters .. ie. if you have an industrial fan running near your mic. when you specify the noise floor, the software(hardware) will "ignore" the sound(s) created by the background elements [in this case, the fan] .. this is noise floor cancellation.

To further this concept, with tweaking, you can specify a "live" source for the noise-floor .. that is: you can specify a WAV or AUX / line source as the noise floor. Application: you specify the WAV portion of your sound card. This will instruct the voice recognition process to ignore ALL (a defined tolerance) input that matches the "live" sound floor. Ie. When you specify the WAV source, the voice recognition will ignore all sounds that match the music / whatever that is being played .. it will ignore all similar tones to whatever degree you specify.

.. do note however that this technology is still very young .. but is however avaliable!

.. in case anybody needs more background on the conecpt .. it is similar to the concept of harmonic wave cancellation .. as a point of interest, 8 or so years ago, I saw a program on TV that showed a car running yet producing almost NO sound (WIHTOUT a muffler!!) .. this was done by sampling the engine noise and reproducing and exact copy at 180' out of phase .. thus cancelling the sound that the car made (almost completely) .. cool huh ? .. I think many of us would benefit from a collar type application for our women =) [ j/k ]

-James

ppgt94 · 07-09-2001, 03:54 PM

Well. You must not need a super computer for that to work. The autopc (310c, the first model) had a 66mhz hitachi processor.

smashr2k · 07-09-2001, 06:14 PM

Yes, there are two winamp plugins that i know about. Trimodal and VoodooVoice. Sadly, i have lost the URLs to both, and considering i helped write one, that is a pretty big feat. E-mail me if you really want them, and i can spend some time digging out the source code and recompiling it.

kevmo · 07-09-2001, 07:18 PM

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 ....)

kevmo · 07-09-2001, 07:24 PM

Something really kinda unrelated, but in response to a post by JamesB. I agree totally with him

".. in case anybody needs more background on the conecpt .. it is similar to the concept of harmonic wave cancellation .. as a point of interest, 8 or so years ago, I saw a program on TV that showed a car running yet producing almost NO sound (WIHTOUT a muffler!!) .. this was done by sampling the engine noise and reproducing and exact copy at 180' out of phase .. thus cancelling the sound that the car made (almost completely) .. cool huh ? "

He is completely right about that. At work I am working on a few projects that involve that technique, we have a speaker generating noise, a microphone sampling that noise, a layer with a control speaker attached, and a microphone monitering the noise on the other side. By cancelling the noise signal with the control using an FIR filter, we achieved really great results! (The noise was almost zero at the performance measuring microphone)

Thats my 2 bits

mellman99 · 07-09-2001, 07:32 PM

If the moderater happens to come by here, i doubt if you guys keep the logs. but check back a few months ago, like february-april time, and look for the big voice recognition thread, it'd be helpful if you could send it to me or just repost it for these guys. thanks! and you guys who think its not possible....yea....*laughs* anyways, email kevmo for the program.....and it works great. well happy voicing!