Re: Microphone wiring

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Marc_F_Hult" <MFHult@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

<stuff snipped>

> Lest I be misunderstood or misconstrued, note that by "audio noise" in the
> paragraph above I meant "electronic noise" . Extraneous noises picked up
by
> mics are a severe problem even with the best of installations. In general,
> folks seem to have much greater expectations of multi-mic VR than the
physics
> permit.
>
> http://www.shure.com/ProAudio/Products/us_pro_ea_myth
> http://www.shure.com/ProAudio/Products/us_pro_ea_predicting
>
> One partial solution is to restrict the installation to phone-based
equipment
> with good fidelity.

Yes!  That's a very important point.  One's lifestyle may have great
influence on whether a VR system is going to be successful.  Having lots of
people, lots of different voices and lots of background noises like TVs or
radios will really degrade performance.

Perhaps things have changed since I last played with VR in the late 90's,
but it was pretty hilarious to set up a voice recognition program to simply
type what it *thought* (word used anthropomorphically!) it heard out of
over-amplified background noise.  The results were often far better than any
TV sitcom.

The problem is the imprecision of single spoken words.  Last night, I was
channel surfing and heard and saw what I thought were two attractive women
discussing UNIX.  Turns out after watching for a few seconds that they were
talking about eunuchs.  Click!(-:

The telephone idea is good.  If there were a tiny pendant cordless I could
hang around my neck it would nearly solve the problem of not needing to
actually find a phone to issue a command.  That's what I think most HA VR
users are seeking.  The artifact-free command system that works almost by
magic.

Even two centuries from now, the Star Trek folks still needed that "brooch"
communicator - and that's probably what cellphones will be reduced to in
size someday.  One doesn't need anything but a channel back to the base
since you should be able to command it entirely by voice so you don't even
need a keypad.  With little need for other cordless phone features, it would
be a great way to "run the house" by voice.  Add an RFID chip and locators
in the house and you've got occupancy detection licked, too.

--
Bobby G.