Amulet have posted a really interesting video showing a custom Windows Media Center addin being controlled by voice with a Microsoft Kinect. The video shows how the Kinect can locate where in the room the voice controls are coming from and how well it works with the custom UI.
I love the combination of the Kinect and the Amulet software, this looks like the best and most practice implantation of Kinect I have seen for use in a home theatre. There is even a option to fix the location that the system listens from, so you can have it only listen to commands from your seat in the living room and ignore everyone else.
Amulet are considering releasing a free version of this application if there is enough interest, its a cut down version of their full system and only controls music, a full commercial version could follow when Microsoft release a commercial version of the Kinect SDK. I think is a really good use of the Kinect
Anyone who’s ever used the latest speech recognition technologies with a plain old microphone will tell you that the results can be surprisingly good, as long as you stay close to the mic, have no background noise and turn the mic off when you’re not speaking.
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:
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What happens when the music’s playing so loud that the Kinect can no longer hear you shouting ‘Stop’?
you have to really shout and wave your arms!
or now you can just raise your hand to lower the music!
check it out here.
http://www.amuletdevices.com/blog/index.php/amulet-voice-kinect-%E2%80%93-part-1-using-haarclassifiers-so-you-can-sit-down.html
Steve