1 Topic by jp

  • jp
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  • From: San Diego
  • Registered: 2007-05-31
  • Posts: 16

Topic: Why Chumby needs a built-in Microphone

Chumby will make the perfect whole-house intercom replacement.

My parents have a big beautiful house overlooking a big lake in Arkansas.  The house was built about ten years ago, but still has an ancient hard-wired intercom system that works very poorly.  My dad has been asking me for ideas on how to fix/replace it.

Chumby looks ideal for this purpose.  About 5 or 6 chumbys placed around the house and set up to work as intercom system in addition to playing music and serving up all kinds of useful widgets.  They already have wifi all over the house.  Looks like a perfect solution.

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The other reason is for voice recognition.  With no IR input, this becomes even more important.  Sure, you can set the Chumby up to cycle through some different widgets, but when you want to see your stock price, you want to see it now!  Humans have grown used to instant gratification lately.  If I want to see what those turkeys at Broadcom have done to my Qualcomm stock price today I don't want to have to wait for it to cycle around.  I would much prefer to have a chumby that just sits on a Time/Temp widget all the time, and then temporarily switches to something else when I yell at it.  "Calendar"......."Stocks"......"Slashdot"  That's how I would like to interact with my Chumby.  It's not "Manly" to squeeze it three times to get a stock quote.

jp

Many people are concerned about the condition of Politics in America today.  What they don't understand is that the Fathers of our Nation were shooting for maximum comedic value.  In that regard, our system of government has only improved with time. -- Mark Twain (if he were alive today and inhabiting my body)

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  • Duane
  • Duane
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  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-24
  • Posts: 8,197

Re: Why Chumby needs a built-in Microphone

The production chumbys will have built in microphones.

However, the processor probably isn't powerful enough to do much in the way of speech recognition - after all, desktop computers with ten times more powerful processors and thirty times more memory don't seem to be very good at it, so it's perhaps a bit much to expect this little device to do it.  Perhaps some clever programmer can figure something out.

Just remember:

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3 Reply by jp

  • jp
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  • From: San Diego
  • Registered: 2007-05-31
  • Posts: 16

Re: Why Chumby needs a built-in Microphone

ROFL

Once I get it working, I'll take this "Perhaps some clever programmer can figure something out."...as a compliment.  wink

BTW, I'm talking about recognizing at most a few dozen commands, not speech to text dictation.  Several orders of magnitude difference in the scope of the problem and the processor power needed to do it well.

Another way to look at the problem...can you speak well enough to talk to a computer?

thanks,
jp
P.S.  Congratulations on your 500th post!

Many people are concerned about the condition of Politics in America today.  What they don't understand is that the Fathers of our Nation were shooting for maximum comedic value.  In that regard, our system of government has only improved with time. -- Mark Twain (if he were alive today and inhabiting my body)

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  • Registered: 2007-11-09
  • Posts: 78

Re: Why Chumby needs a built-in Microphone

This was a discussion about the alpha prototypes, right? Any chance the production Chumbys, with their increased processing power, can handle some sort of speech recognition? Maybe recorded macros, like jp was talking about - where a number of people can record their voice for a particular command, like - "skip", "night mode", "music", "change channel", "scroll up/down", etc.? Probably preceded by "Chumby" or something so that regular conversations don't interfere? BTW, my cell phone does this, and I doubt it's got a processor nearly as powerful as the Chumby's.

  • From: Singapore
  • Registered: 2006-08-26
  • Posts: 188

Re: Why Chumby needs a built-in Microphone

The increase in power of the production chumby is modest, from 266 to 350 MHz.

That being said, I think jp's point still stands--for a reduced vocabulary, speech recognition is remarkably more efficient and reliable in terms of processing power. So I think you could get the chumby to do that, and there may even be some open source projects for that (I haven't done a search for them but I'd be surprised if there wasn't one).

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  • Registered: 2007-12-20
  • Posts: 3

Re: Why Chumby needs a built-in Microphone

Way back near the dawn of time, there was enough processing power in an Apple ][ to do some limited vocabulary speech recognition.  I think that it was speaker dependent, and recognized about 16 words or so, but this was on
a 1MHz 6502.