Mike,
Once i saw the magic mirrors online i knew that I wanted my house A.I. in a mirror in every room. I think I’ve proven to myself that the concept is pretty doable and will work (the bigger question is why would any sane person do this?).
I have been following the Echo threads and it’s pretty exciting! I started on my project before the Echo threads matured I was not really happy with Alexa that you had to begin everything with “tell x to turn on y”. Another problem I’ve read about but don’t know if its true is that having a truly “native” app is not possible. If you want to speak to Alexa directly you have to use a push to talk feature as that is the only way to legally use the api. Obviously I cant have that with mirrors.
I do have a ton of questions about how your doing speech to intent. That is fascinating stuff to me. I may have to buy an echo and test it out. I guess i should have bought one when they were on sale back in november.
One of my biggest problem with lack of intent is my own memory. Since its a pretty dumb solution i have to remember all the commands word for word. I program in about 5 commands for each item (turn on the light, please turn on the light, turn the bedroom light on, etc) but still cant remember. lol. The worst was the first few days with the alarm clock. At 6 am and half asleep, I could not remember what i had to say to turn it off. It was “snooze” or “snooze please”. “Snooze” is a weird word to me anyways so I dont know if i want to use it. It sounds funny to me. Maybe that is why i could not remember it.lol I may just come up with a cool code work to mean “snooze”. Anyways, so now, when deciding what commands to use, I stop thinking about it for a while and leave the room. I’ll do something to take my mind off of it. Then i walk back into the room and write down first 5 commands or so i can think of off the top of my head. Just guess’s that I think would work. If they are spontaneous to me i reason that they are the first ones i will try when i cant remember. Hope that made sense.
[edit: added jasper thoughts]
I had looked at maybe using jasper but decided against it because of its current lack of support for a cheap beamforming microphone. The only two mic’s that I could see that were viable and affordabe, but also had beamforming and noise cancellation was the kinect and the echo. I ruled out the echo because of the limitations above and because you had not yet created the skill! So that left me with the kinect. To get the full benefit of the noise cancelling and beamforming features of the kinect, you have to use the kinect sdk which is windows only. Hence, i decided to use windows and the kinect . That decision made jarvis and mega-voice.command as my current best choice (again , because you had not yet created the echo skill
But wait , you say, jasper has support for the kinect. Ah yes, i did check into that but it turns out that jasper does have basic support for the kinect. However it does not support its beamforming features and treats it like a regular mic as jasper does not use the kinect sdk… Through my own tests at home, having a beamforming mic in the room was key to making it work. You just cant use a regular mic for picking up speech in a noisy room. Its what makes alexa so good at listening. So anyway, thats how I got to this point. Kinect-windows-jarvis and finally linked with openhab. [end edit]
My kids call me “skynet” now so i think its a pretty good sign that things are moving forward. lol.
Looking forward to seeing how the Alexa skill progresses. Great job! Would love to maybe have it as a go between F.R.I.D.A.Y. and openhab. Let me know when i can pepper you with long, dragged out questions.lol
Kimberly F