Amulet Devices Voice Remote for Windows Media Center

Amulet Devices Blog

CES Day Three

Sat, January 10, 2009 by

After three days on my feet, I’ll be glad when the show is finally over! Two video interviews today – one with Richard Taylor of BBC’s Click technology show, the other with the team from Games On Smash, the online gaming website. Very different vibes, but both seemed to go well.

I had some entertainment earlier – two hard-core music fans passed by as I was giving a music demo and weren’t too impressed by the choice of music. I explained to them that Steve was responsible for selecting the artists, and they promptly headed over to Steve’s i-Stage stand and berated him on his poor musical taste. He still doesn’t know what happened (unless he reads this blog, of course…)

One benefit we’ve had from being here at the show is the opportunity to see how well Amulet behaves with a large variety of different speaking voices and accents. It’s been very encouraging – while a couple of visitors who were not native English speakers struggled with some commands, just about everyone else was able to control Amulet successfully.

The most common problem was simply that people tended to make up their own commands. Part of Amulet’s accuracy comes from using a well-chosen vocabulary that limits ambiguity, yet somehow, visitors were able to take simple example commands we suggested and repeat them as something entirely different. Not surprisingly, Amulet wasn’t too accommodating in those cases!

Probably the most rewarding part of the show has been asking people to name a random music artist which we then call up with Amulet. Despite the earlier comments about Steve’s musical taste, he’s assembled an impressively large collection of music, covering everything from Dr Hook to Rondo Veneziano with plenty of modern music in between. Visitors never failed to be impressed by this, and by the speed with which Amulet responded.

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