Amulet Devices Voice Remote for Windows Media Center

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Archive for April, 2012

Delta DVR launching at DEMO 2012

Wed, April 18, 2012 by

Our friends at Whiteman Technology are launching the Delta DVR at DEMO Spring 2012 in Silicon Valley tomorrow. It’s one of the first commercial DVRs based on Windows 7 Embedded running Media Center, and it includes the Amulet Voice Remote as standard.

The Delta DVR from Whiteman Technologies

It’s a very nicely designed piece of equipment, and has some impressive capabilities: Six HD tuners for recording TV, built-in 802.11N for wireless connectivity to all your other media sources within the house, integrated Blu-ray playback, and even a UI interface for downloading games from the app store. Not to mention, of course, full voice control.

If you’re in Santa Clara tomorrow afternoon, 19th April, why not call in to DEMO 2012 at the Hyatt Regency where Ryan will be demonstrating the Delta DVR on the main Demo stage at 3:45 pm. You can also visit Whiteman Technologies throughout the day at pavillion booth #D15.

For more information, visit WhitemanTechnology.com or read the press release.

Update: Engadget have posted an interview with Ryan Whiteman where they discuss what’s inside the Delta DVR and some of the associated technology.

What is the Weather Today? Amulet’s Custom Commands

Tue, April 10, 2012 by

Amulet users often ask us for additional voice commands to check the weather, perform unit conversion, read news headlines, and so on.

While we hope to incorporate some of these in a future software release, you can do a surprising amount right now using Amulet’s custom command capability, especially when you combine it with some VBScript.

To demonstrate, I’ve written a simple Visual Basic script to fetch the current weather forecast for your city from Yahoo Weather, decode the XML data returned, and speak the result using Amulet’s voice. Below, I walk you through it.

Note: This discussion is quite technical. If you’re comfortable editing text files with Notepad, you should be able to follow along fine, and adjust the script to suit your own purposes.
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