Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Another day of HomeSeer

Well, after a full day into it, it keeps getting cooler and cooler.

I installed the touchpad interface, which I was told on cocoontech that it wouldn't support UPB since UPB support was added after the touchpad interface was originally added... well, the touchpad interface has been updated for HomeSeer v2.1, and now supports UPB devices. This is a wonderful, natural interface to use on the Audreys. The only downside is that I don't like the stock skins for the touchpad interface all that much... have to do a little design work on that.

Also, from the HomeSeer message board, I got this script (http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=111661) that is a multi-user voice activated alarm clock. I can now just tell my tablet 'Wake up Adam at 7:20 AM', and it will do so. I even added some church bells to the beginning of the announcement so I won't be startled awake by the voice of Microsoft Mary.

I think I'll go look for some wav files of Big Ben in London and have a virtual grandfather clock via speaker clients and Audreys... see if the wife likes it.

Also, I'm looking for common events that other people have so I can test out the event engine further... if you happen to read my blog (thanks, Mom), please feel free to suggest events that you use in your home. Thanks!

posted by Adam @ 8:56 AM   2 comments

2 Comments:

At 12:21 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Buy the HomeSeer Voices or get the AT&T voices - any SAPI 5 concatenated text-to-speech engine - much, much, much better than the synthetic/hybrid TTS engines that Microsoft provides for free, such as Microsoft Mary.

 
At 8:10 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Adam,

The touchpad interface is pretty basic and probably won't ever win any design awards! :) However, there are two other touchscreen programs available that provide a nice polished interface; "Maestro", by Harmony Home and "MainLobby" by Cinemar. Both are Flash-based, so you'll need to run them on touchscreen units that can run Flash 8.

Have fun with your system!

-Mark

PS: Another poster was right... Microsoft Mary is very synthetic sounding. The voices we carry are concatenated speech voices from NeoSpeech (Kate and Paul) and sound very much like real people talking.

Mark Colegrove
HomeSeer Technologies
109 Powder Hill Rd
Bedford, NH 03110
email: mailto:mark@homeseer.com
web: http://www.homeseer.com

 

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