Hi,

I tried to send a private email through your "contact us" page but hadn't heard back from anyone, so I thought I would try a post in the forum. With the upcoming release of media browser three, we would like to incorporate voice recognition into it. I know there had been talk of releasing an open source version of the amulet voice kinect software and was kind of hoping that it was still a possibility. I believe that the idea will be to have the kinect software work outside of widows media center, because media browser three is standalone. I all know that the talker can be used outside of mce and am hopeful that the monitor.exe will also. It would be a great pleasure to help further develop this fantastic product, by incorporating these components into media browser. We have a large community who would love to see this happen.

Thank you for your time.

Ben

Eddie, or whomever else may be listening...

We would really appreciate a response on the matter. Your program is top notch, and deserves further development. Please allow us to integrate Amulet Voice Kinect into MB3. The possibilities of what Amulet can bring to the table are endless.

Xzener

Hi Chef,
unfortunately we wont be doing any new work on Amulet Voice Kinect any time soon. There are a few reasons why that's so, let me give you some background.
When I started working on that software well over a year ago now I was hoping we would release it as an app for a few dollars that people could use to control mediacenter, particularly if they already had a Kinect (for their xbox etc). unfortunately when Microsoft released the terms and conditions of the SDK they made it very developer un-friendly as far as I'm concerned. What they did was, insist that if your selling software that uses their SDK you can't use it with the the xbox Kinect you would instead have to sell it only for use with the PC Kinect. Now there are 17 million xbox Kinect's out there and very few PC Kinects
. Also PC kinects are in the region of $250 where as xbox kinects are only $150. This doesn't seem like a good way to encourage developers to develop for Kinect as far as i'm concerned so I stopped developing Amulet voice Kinect and decided to release a free version
(that covers just music media etc), that way we wouldn't breech the Microsoft T&C's etc.

Also , Microsoft seem content to not move the Mediacenter platform forward and have been starving it of any feature improvements for some time now. So currently I'm working on integrating Amulet voice remote with XBMC, I'm not using any Microsoft speech recognition software in an effort to make the software work on all XBMC platforms etc.
I may look at integrating Kinect with that if I can find some opensource software that would work with Kinect and utilise audio smarts like echo-cancellation and and beamforming etc. It would be nice to be able to control XBMC with voice from both the amulet remote or the Kinect , depending which was closest/easiest for you to use.

Hope this isn't too dissapointing for you , I might look at the new standalone version of mediabrowser soon to see how it might be integrated but my impression is XBMC has a bigger following presently, let me know if you know otherwise ! etc.

Steve.

Hi Steve,

I am not disappointed at all. The amulet remote is the answer piece of speech hardware on the market. I have learned the Microsoft sdk for speech and also am working on the kinect sdk as well. Thanks for the reply. I have been able to create a speech synthesis console at that gets strings passed to it with arguments/parameters and my recognition software is coming along quite nicely. I am able to load grammer from an external file and read the words I want it to understand from there. Just wanted to say, that amulet work with the kinect is by far the best I have seen, and I can only hope to create something even remotely as good as amulet voice kinect.for,msdn browser three.