evil project progress

[avacon]

I've made good progress on getting my house to listen to me. On the first and third floors I can now say things like:

• house, turn kitchen lights on
• house, what is status of the laundry?
• house, what temperature is it?
• house, I am going to watch a movie now.
• house, play some classical music.
• good night house.

among quite a few other things and have the computer do the right thing in response (including turning lights on and off, controlling the mp3 player, and responding with answers about the states of various bits of home automation). I'm using the Sphinx2 speech recognition system from CMU along with some omnidirectional microphones. This works really well in my bedroom, but the first floor is having more trouble (and has a different type of microphone). The microphones all took batteries so I had to adapt them to draw power off of USB.

This weekend I wrote a natural language parser to interpret the output from Sphinx2, and to generate a full corpus of sentences for it, to make the system more extensible. The larger dictionary is causing some problems, though, as there more words to cause confusion and the first floor microphone isn't picking things up anywhere near as well.

I'm also having some X10 problems on the first floor which I need to troubleshoot. (I can turn some of the lights off, but some of the wall dimmer switches have strangely stopped responding to "on" commands...)

Otherwise I had a wonderful weekend full of hanging out with spiffy people while also having plenty of time for sleep and evil projects. Whee!