Comment by dperfect | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dperfect | Hacker News Reader

This may bring me one step closer to my personal "holy grail" of home automation: every room in the house[1] working with seamless voice-activated home automation. This is what I'm ultimately after:

- A cheap device (DIY if possible) in the form factor of a small plug-in unit. Ideally the device itself should be practically "invisible" in each room, and won't require any special home wiring. This is definitely in the realm of possibility for a Raspberry Pi (or similar).

- A microphone for the device that works at least as well as the Echo's far-field mic. I have not been able to find any good options for this, apart from some obscure parts that are too expensive for me to test, let alone buy for every room.

- Software that allows for voice-activated operation. There's probably a suitable workaround for doing this with the Alexa Voice Service now, though it may require more CPU power than is available on the Raspberry Pi.

- Ideally, I could host the voice service myself and wouldn't have to worry about the privacy implications of going through someone like Amazon. I know there are several existing software packages that claim to do this, but none that I've found can match the quality of Echo/Alexa for everyday interaction.

- Audio feedback does not need to be high quality, but at least audible. A small speaker within the device is probably enough. For other areas of the house, it would be nice for the output to be connected to a bluetooth speaker in the room or a home audio system (if available).

The Echo Dot appears to be a pretty close match for this (though I haven't tried it) - at least in terms of functionality, but the form factor still seems a bit off. I'd rather have a self-contained plug-in unit than something that sits on a desk or table.

[1] Or most of the house anyway

> is may bring me one step closer to my personal "holy grail" of home automation: every room in the house[1] working with seamless voice-activated home automation.

But why? What do you want to automate?

That's the part I never understood about this stuff. What is there to automate in the first place?

Yeah, and what about the endless false positives in every room of the house?

It's pretty hard to order something via Alexa - I know, my friends have tried to order me several things ranging from sex toys to more Echos. Never worked. Please don't spread nonsense.

Didn't know that. Edited to reflect the actual concern, minus the humor.

Personally I'd love to automate

* lights * alarm clock (setting, turning it off and on, 15 more minutes) * be able to turn on my xbox/fire tv and tell it I want to watch <x>, then it figures out how * taking the dog out when it's 1am and I just want to go to bed (okay this one might take a little longer).

lots of things would be nice to have control of from work, or even just from bed at night. climate control, door locks, lights, etc.

Not the OP but here's some of the stuff I have/want:

Have:

Adding things to my shopping list (via Alexa - currently in the kitchen and bathroom - two most frequent rooms where I'm like "hey I need more XXXX")

Changing the temperature (Nest via phone app and command line tool I wrote, and now Alexa just did a native integration)

Finding out my schedule for the day.

Finding out the weather forecast for the day.

Playing music (via Sonos or Alexa)

Locking front door when I'm going to bed.

Getting notified of movement or sound in the house while I away (Nest Cam and Smart Things)

......

Like the OP I'd love to have the voice control available in any room of the house. I'd love to have better security features (i.e. if I drive up my driveway at 3 AM turn on the outside lights, if a stranger drives up my driveway at 3 AM WAKE ME UP WITH AN ALARM). I'd love better voice controlled Sonos music selection. Composing emails, having handsfree phone or video calls, warming up the oven at a certain time, etc...

It's not low cost yet, but check out http://josh.ai. Starting high end but price will drop significantly.

I will, thanks!

Sounds like all of these could also be handled by a phone/watch instead of needing a device for each room.

For adding to shopping list, check out Amazon Dash.

I have a few Dash buttons, but it's SUPER limited what you can link them to. Plus I'd need hundreds of them:) The "Alexa, add XXXX to my shopping list" works really well for me.

I don't wear a watch around the house, and I don't really like smart watches honestly - I like big heavy metal automatics. Likewise I enjoy being able to leave my phone on the charger somewhere else. I dunno. I mean long term dream would be integrating things like "smart" mirrors, semi-smart AI-esque assistants, and so on. Then again, I'm currently in a zero-tech house on the beach in Costa Rica, with a barely there internet connection, so it's not like any of this is that important...

Let me introduce you to Dasher: https://github.com/maddox/dasher

That's a good question. Maybe "home automation" isn't exactly the right name for it, because that's just a part of it. It is nice to be able to control things by voice (lights, locks, window shades, music, TV, etc), but to call any of those things "essential" just sounds lazy :)

For me, the Amazon Echo is more about having a connection to the world without looking at a screen. Getting answers to random questions (or utilities like timers), latest traffic conditions for travel, weather, etc are all really great applications for a voice interface. If that could also be combined with a good communication platform (voice calls, text/email messaging, etc), it would be even better.

What does Echo offer that Siri, etc. don't? You already have all of that functionality through your phone.

I'd also like to ask: how is inviting more networked microphones into your house a good idea?

OP more describes home control than home automation. Home automation is the house intelligently doing things for you, without your prompting. Home control is the house doing things for you when you ask it do things for you.

E.g. Home automation: Every day at sunset, lower the blinds

E.g. Home control : You say "House, lower the blinds now".

Agreed. I want minimal technology at home. I deal with it enough all day at work.

I just want technology that WORKS at home. Too much of my time is spent fixing other people's "mistakes". I find Alexa fits that bill. Takes a bit of learning the right cadence of speaking to her. And unfortunately she has the same name as my daughter, which causes some interesting interactions.

This is what I always wonder too.

If I lived alone with no pets I'd love to be able to automate the temperature to save money when I wasn't home. But there are usually people in my house, and there are always pets there, so I have to keep it pretty temperate in there at all times.

Other automatable things (lights, lawn sprinklers) are so easily accomplished with simple analog timers that I really do not see the attraction in controlling them via an app. Maybe it's just the programmer in me thinking... at this point in my life, I'm very jaded when it comes to software.

Security is a big one, I guess. It would be nice to be able to monitor that remotely. Though honestly I already have a dog in the house which is probably more effective than 90% of the solutions on the market.

My big thing is whole-house streaming audio, and we've had that for years with Airplay and Sonos and now with Chromecast as well. So that's cool.

Things I've considered automating: different light settings (temperature, which light to keep on, watch-style notifications/interactions when not at my device (usually because it's charging), instructions to nearby screens or audio systems, reminders... A lot of it relates to integrations and interactions which require too many button pushes. Voice control is one step closer to "mind-reading"-like experiences and having knowledge of who is in which room would improve the context-awareness of existing apps and whole-home systems. For example, ideally if I said "play some music" it would know who I was and what I liked vs others in the house. This is more than voice control, and is likely phone- or app-integrated, but every small step gets us closer. ;-)

Yeah, if anyone found something equivalent to the Echo in mic tech that I can hook up to my own setup, I'd die to know. That's the one thing I can't really replicate on my own system.

The kinect has gotten good reviews for its microphone array

The kinect seems pretty cool. I've heard of one person who brought it into work and used it to identify and greet people who walked into his office. So there is probably some pretty cool user identification projects you could do with it.

I haven't bothered getting the SDK for the Kinect 2 yet but both of them seem to only be good for about 135 degrees around the device - the Echo is a much better omnidirectional microphone.

My (admittedly anecdotal) experience having an Xbox One is that it would pick up phrases that barely sounded like built in triggers and do unexpected things at unexpected times, such that I felt forced to disable it.

We've had an Echo since before they were available to the public (ex-Amazon employee here), and it does occasionally beep when it thinks it hears "Alexa."

But it's very rare that it goes beyond that; usually we hear the beep and one of us will yell "never mind!", and then the Echo will go silent. Sometimes it will cancel itself, too. I think that the always-listening part is less discriminating than the active voice recognition, and that it can re-parse the last couple of seconds and decide, in retrospect, that you didn't say "Alexa."

That said, I just recently said to my wife, "I wonder if Alexa knows 'sudo make me a sandwich'". The timing was such that it parsed "sudo make me a sandwich" and answered, "Well, if you ask like that, how can I refuse?" :)

We had a good laugh. Funny thing was, looking at the app later, it was actually parsed as "Pseudo make me a sandwich." I bet Google Now would have corrected it to sudo. :)

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