For everyone else, here’s a preview video showing how well the voice integration works:

If you’re not familiar with My Movies, it’s one of the nicest, most cleanly integrated Media Center plug-ins out there. It presents a very professional and user-friendly front-end to all your TV & Movie media files, automatically provides movie backdrops, descriptions, actor lists, etc. and even lets you store your own DVD titles directly on your Media Center; highly recommended.

Here’s something the video doesn’t show, which you might find interesting: while the SHOW MOVIE command shows details for any movie in your collection, you can bypass this and start the movie immediately, from anywhere in Media Center, by just saying PLAY MOVIE name. I find this very convenient when calling up Toy Story or Winnie the Pooh for the umpteenth time at the request of my three-year-old!

We’d love to hear feedback from those of you already trying out the beta software with My Movies. If you already have an Amulet Voice Remote and want to give it a try, head over to the beta forums and download the latest version.

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!

But if you wanted to place a mic under your TV and have it listen to you while the TV is on, then good luck! The mic won’t be able to hear you over the TV audio and worse still, the TV content will trigger the speech recognition causing it to execute all sorts of spurious commands.

Well that’s now changed. There are several audio “smarts” built into Microsoft’s Kinect game controller that allow it to sit next to a TV and make speech recognition possible at a range of several meters! I’ve made a couple of videos that show just such a scenario:

I think the Kinect video capabilities such as skeletal tracking and depth sensing have tended to overshadow the audio capabilities of the unit. From my experience with Kinect so far, I think its audio smarts are seriously impressive.

The beam-forming technology uses four microphones and some digital signal processing to focus a narrow beam that is steerable towards the person talking, enabling sound within the beam to be dramatically amplified over sounds outside of the beam. Also, the use of Audio Echo Cancellation (AEC) means that the Kinect will take the sound produced by the TV and subtract it from the sound picked up by the mics, which means the TV can be on and playing media while you’re saying speech commands and the speech recogniser can still understand what was said.

It’s not all plain sailing. I found the echo cancellation to be problematic at first; this turned out to be a requirement that sound be coming from the speakers at all times when AEC is enabled. If there was a couple of seconds gap between songs and the AEC was on then the Kinect would have a bit of a fit.

I tried to get around this by playing a looping silent audio WAV file and this did fool the Kinect and prevent it having a seizure when the sound stopped. But in practice this technique seemed to degrade the speech recognition performance. Now I’m turning the Kinect AEC on and off in sync with the audio output and things are much better.

If you look at the video closely you will see the AEC text display that shows the AEC switching on and off. While it’s possible for the AEC to let you be heard over music playing at a reasonable volume, if you’re a heavy metal head who needs 100dB’s or nothing, then it won’t be able to cope.

It’s difficult to convey the comparative sound levels accurately in the videos as I had to have the camera mic point to me so I could be heard over the music; this had the effect of making it look like the music was set very low. It wasn’t , the level of the music was at a good level for listening. The setup is very useable — you can see that while there are several commands recognised from backround noise etc, indicated by the red percentage values that pop up on screen from time to time, the fact that they are displayed in red means they are being disregarded as they don’t meet the confidence threshold that I set.

While the system does get the very occasional mis-recognition where I might be listening to something and it will suddenly play someone else, the inconvenience of telling it to resume what it was doing the odd time is far outweighed by the convenience of being able to bark at the TV from the couch!

I plan to make another couple of videos soon; one which will show the beam being set to one extreme and how you can then say the same command from that direction and be recognised and then say it from the other extreme and be ignored, and another video
showing the edge of the distance limits — I’ve used it here up to 20 feet.

We’re considering releasing the software used in the demo free if we get enough interest. It’s a cut down version of the regular Amulet Devices software that’s tailored to work with Kinect but controls audio tracks only. A commercial version that allows voice control
of all media, including the TV guide etc, will follow when Microsoft release a commercial version of the Kinect SDK.

Microsoft bought TheGreenButton about three years ago, and for a while continued to run it as a (mostly) independent support forum, recognizing the value of the community that had been built up there. Recently, however, they decided to merge the site with their existing Expert forums, renaming it the “Windows Entertainment and Connected Home” forum.

Unfortunately, this had the side effect of removing the sense of identity associated with TheGreenButton, and many regular users started drifting away.

Well, good news! The original Green Button has now been resurrected at TheGreenButton.tv. It’s completely independent of Microsoft, so conversation will likely be more forthright. The site has only been running for two weeks, but is already gaining members at a fast rate.

Why not pay a visit and find out the latest Media Center news and views.

The new release should be generally available soon, but in the meantime, I thought you might like to see Amulet doing something a little different:

Amulet user James Richards has extended his VoxCommando product to support dynamic language translation using Google Translate, and it works very well indeed. Check out James’ new video here:

You can find out more on the VoxCommando website.

If you have any other interesting applications for the Amulet Voice Remote, let us know and we’ll highlight them here.

Imagine a software application that would sit on a PC on your LAN. It would have speech recognition capability and receive voice input from anywhere in the house over a radio link courtesy of an Amulet remote (or maybe a wearable device). It would find content on any DLNA media controller type devices on the network, and enable its playback on any DLNA media renderer devices on the network.

What would you think of such a device? I’ll start a thread in the forums (General) and you can let me know.

The first is the ability to “push” a video (or other piece of media) from a PC on the LAN directly to my TV. By just right clicking on it in Windows Media Player and selecting “Play To”, it immediately starts playing on the TV!

The second is the ability to “pull” live TV content from a PC with a tuner card running DVBLink Source and Network Pack to another PC connected to the TV and running Windows Media Player. The secret here proved to be finding all the TV channels under “Recorded TV” in WMP — not the most intuitive place for live TV channel selection.

You can find some good information on Windows 7 DLNA here.

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Thanks to Michael Welter of MissingRemote, Peter Brown of The Green Button and Wendy Stidmon of Microsoft for coordinating this great event.  I’d love to see similar events for enthusiasts throughout the country.  For now, Houston has set the bar…