New Voice Technology

[JDRoberts]

@PhilB

Here is another piece of tech that might be helpful to all of you that would like to voice control of Smartthings. I have looked too far into this yet but based on what I read so far you can do most anything you can do with the Echo via this app.

http://www.heylexi.com/

HeyLexie is an app using Alexa. There will be a lot of these now that Amazon has opened things up. Note that it cannot play music or read audiobooks.

However, the biggest limitation is that it’s using your phone. As someone who is quadriparetic, I have depended on voice technology for quite a while. The echo absolutely blew me away with the quality of its far field recognition. Across the room even with the television on. Nothing else that I’ve seen for under $50,000 compares to that.

You can already have excellent voice control of SmartThings using an android phone , Tasker, and sharp tools. And of course hey Google can handle most of what the echo can do as well. A number of community members have done this, and are pleased with it.

But what none of the phonebased systems can do is match the echo’s hardware. I use both Siri and echo now, for different things. The echo is Miles better on a practical day-to-day use unless you’re actually holding the phone in your hand.

So it’s always great to have more choices, but any app which is dependent on the phone’s microphone is just a different class of device than echo.

Voice Command Solution - Discussion

Hey everyone, I am sure many of you have heard of Ivee (helloivee.com). I personally don’t own one, but it did make me do some thinking. For them to achieve integration with SmartThings, it would appear they have to communicate with the SmartThings cloud. Is this correct? Have we heard of any way to do this officially as of yet? Here is where I am going with this…: My dream would be to put 5+ Raspberry Pi’s in my house, with a good bi-directional mic, and a wifi dongle. Toss on a simple “always listening app” and basically build a voice recognition app using one of the many cloud-based voice recognition api’s. I look at the products like Ivee, and in some ways I feel that they are too ambitious with trying to integrate into 100 solutions, they are trying to do too much with having a pr…

In contrast, Viv ( first post in this thread) is a whole new AI. It’s intended to be embedded in place of hey Google or hey Siri. Maybe even to create a smarter Alexa. I do expect to see a bright future for that one.