Amulet Devices Voice Remote for Windows Media Center

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Archive for October, 2011

Amulet moving to voice in the cloud

Tue, October 11, 2011 by

As some of you know, we’ve been working on moving Amulet’s voice recognition technology into the cloud.

If you’re an existing Amulet Voice Remote user, you’ll know that Amulet’s voice recognition takes place on your home theatre PC. While this works well for Media Center users, it’s not a good fit for the typical settop box provided by your cable or satellite provider, which usually lacks the CPU performance for good quality speech recognition.

Today, with most households having highspeed Internet, it’s feasible to move the voice recognition engine to a remote Internet server. When you talk into your Amulet Remote, X-Box Kinect, or other voice input device, the audio can be streamed across the Internet in realtime, recognized, and the results sent back to your living room, and it all happens fast enough to keep you from getting impatient.

I’ve made a short video to show how well this works in practise. We have an internal prototype Electronic Program Guide (EPG) application we’ve developed, which works with our next generation low-cost audio remote control hardware.

In the demo, you can see me giving voice commands which are processed in realtime by a remote cloud-based recognition engine. The demo was recorded in Ireland, and the cloud server is in the US, so as you can see, distance is no longer a barrier.

We plan to make further announcements about this technology soon — stay tuned!