Re: Just starting out

["Oliver Pell" <odp@xxxxxxx>]

<snip>> I would like to get to the point whereby I have near
complete
control over
> everything internaly by voice and then remotely over the web.
> I have read the reviews on the voice products and I am currently
leaning
> towards the "Home Voice" product, does anyone have any views
on this ?

Hi, I haven't actually build much of a HA system yet (a few lamp modules
really ;-() but I'm in a similar situation to you. I am very interested in
voice control & web access so I thought I'd share the results of some
of my
research:

1. Hardware for voice control is expensive. Ceiling mounted microphones,
limiters (I might skip on these ;-)), mixer etc.
2. You need a reasonable spec computer to do voice recognition in general -
I'm not sure about HomeVoice in general.

More importantly - don't use Homevoice. It seems to be a bit of a mediocre
add-on to an existing HA system to me. I've been experimenting with
Homeseer
and I'm very impressed. Thanks to VBScript you can essentially do
practically anything you want with it and use it as your primary HA
controller. It handles voice recognition - but, crucially, *don't use the
Micro$oft engine*. I couldn't get any results at all from it until I
switched it to use the Dragon dictate engine which I had already installed.
It's now 90% accurate or so (though I am using a headset to test this - not
ceiling mics). The only downside is you need to train each voice but then
you could set up a mini controller to switch between users using X10. At
the
moment this is what I plan to do.

Oliver.