Amulet Devices Blog

I’ve recently been giving some thought to something I call a DLNA Speech Enabled Controller.

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.

I’ve been using the DLNA capability of my Samsung TV for some time to directly access media stored on a Windows 7 PC, but I’ve recently tried out two other scenarios that work surprisingly well thanks to the inbuilt support in Windows 7.

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.

Order your Amulet Voice Remote now for just $199. It’s the most innovative accessory for Windows Media Center!

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I just returned from Houston where I attended the “HoustonWinMeet: A Windows Entertainment and Connected Home Meet-up”.  What a great event.  The venue was awesome and the night was well attended with about 40 home entertainment and home media enthusiasts on hand.  We saw some cool presentations from Drew Peterson and Dan Laycock of Microsoft on  Windows 7 Play To and Windows Product Scout. We also saw several cool new products which will be reviewed on www.missingremote.com in the near term.  We finished with product demos and discussions from Ceton distributor Gregg Cannon from Cannon PC and Kevin Buchanan from Fluid Digital.  The swag and prizes given in the after show raffle made me wish I had been and attendee, not a presenter.

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…

We had a successful evening last week at the #HoustonWinMeet. There will be further details on how much everyone enjoyed using the Amulet Voice Remote later in the week.

On November 4, members of The Green Button reported that their Linksys DMA 2100 & 2200 extenders were freezing on power-up and would no longer connect to Windows Media Center.

Some diligent investigation by several users revealed the problem: the extenders were attempting to connect to a central Linksys server which Cisco (owners of Linksys) had recently taken offline. The firmware handles this badly by refusing to continue until the connection succeeds.

Read the rest of this entry »

People hear about a voice remote control and perhaps think that it merely reproduces the remote control interface using voice. That it just does all the simple buttons using voice. That would be pretty good, but not as exciting or useful as a full voice user interface. The Amulet plugin for Media Center provides a voice interface for accessing media. It’s a new user experience, in the shape of a remote control.

Buttons are good. They provide quick access. But there is a limit to how many are practical. Menus are good, they provide a visible list to move around in. But again, they can be slow to navigate and have limited capacity. This is where voice is a break through. It excels at picking items from big lists. We believe this is a killer capability for media center systems.

People know their music collection. They know their movies. They know the time of day. Using a voice interface you just ask for the music you want, “Play Artist Michael Jackson“. Or the movie, “Play Movie Total Recall“. Or the time of day, “Show Guide Tomorrow at 10 pm“.

We don’t eliminate the buttons, they are useful. To go up a notch in volume is perfect for a button. Quicker than saying “Volume Up“. But what about “Volume Soft“, “Volume Medium“, ”Volume Normal“, “Volume Loud“, ”Volume Full“. That’s what a voice interface can do. Or 5 extra buttons.

Our software makes this new interface possible. We gather all the media lists you have on your system and build a voice interface with all those items. It’s a background plugin that’s always listening in Media Center. Always active, no matter what screen you are looking at. At shows where I demonstrated the system, I used to explain what it did. After a while I found it was best to just say a command and let people see what a voice interface is. You can check it out in our demo video. It’s much more than just a voice remote control.