Hey guys,
Just dropping in for a quicky ;)
Anyone seen the E3 press release from Microsoft and how they showed the future of XBOX360 and XBOX live ?
Well ... I could not care less for the XBOX360 and XBOX Live but what they showed with Kinect was AMAZING !!
They're are also going to officially launch it for PC and since TODAY the Kinect SDK for Windows is in public beta and available freely from the microsoft site.
Now what I saw in the E3 microsoft demo was controlling your xbox by voice and body movement, again ... CARE about the xbox ... but if they can do it on the XBOX then surely we can do it on the PC and collaborate in great effect with other software such as Vox, XMBC, EG, etc ...
Now I know that Kinemote or whatever the windows hack driver is/was called and that you already played with it james but I remember back then that no1 had the microphones working from Kinect.
Could you tell me what the status currently is with the use of Kinect in collaboration with Vox ? Have you continued testing more with it James, has the kinect community gotten the microphone working, cause I think it has the potential to become THE microphone for software such as Vox.
I'm just curious since I'm thinking of getting a Kinect and it would be nice to start using vox with it then.
Currently as you all know I don't have much time to spend on my PC lately and my wife could go into labor as we speak, ... but I do use my XBMC daily atm with my Harmony one, and it saddens me everytime that I cannot use vox since I have not yet had the time to properly test and shop for an open-air mic with the needed noise-cancelation to actually function decently.
So a Kinect update from your point of view James would be greatly appreciated and helpfull in my choice to buy a Kinect or not (yet ... )
Hope I can return in full force soon !!
Peace,
Auri
Great news Auri, I import mine from USA and receive my Kinect today, wow, big day for me, i installed sdk, and my first test was use microphone with voxcommand, and work very fine, equal use amulet remote, but i need more tests, for one conclusive opinion.
About Kinemot don´t work yet with this sdk from microsoft of course, and installing SDK from microsoft, remove all previous drivers, I hope developers from Kinemot launch new version with full support.
Well, there are only 2 examples in SDK pack install, and work fine...
I am happy for share my experience with others users... ;D
Link for Official WebSite Kinect for Windows SDK
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/
Download, forum, documentation etc..
Link for download page:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/download.aspx
System requirements
Hardware
Kinect for Xbox 360 sensor
Computer with a dual-core, 2.66-GHz or faster processor
Windows 7compatible graphics card that supports DirectX® 9.0c capabilities
2-GB RAM (4-GB RAM recommended)
Software
Windows 7 (x86 or x64)
Visual Studio 2010 Express (or other 2010 edition)
Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0
For additional requirements for samples, see the Readme file
Installation instructions
To install this SDK beta:
1.On this page, click Download to start the Kinect for Windows SDK beta download.
2.Click Run to start Setup, and follow the instructions in the Setup Wizard.
Or, to save the download on your computer so that you can install it later, click Save.
I would not rush out to buy a Kinect at this point if I were you. I just installed the sdk (which includes an audio driver to be able to use the kinect array microphone in any program, including VC) and in terms of just using the microphone without any special software running (I need to look into this) I am not very impressed. I am sitting 5-6 feet away and it doesn't seem to understand a lot of simple commands. As soon as music starts playing it understands nothing! :bigno Maybe I am doing something wrong, but I was hoping to be impressed and so far it's a big let down.
I should say that I did create a new speech profile and I configured it to use the microphone as type "other" which is what we should use for a microphone array. I did not do any training, but I generally can create a profile and go with other microphones because my accent is pretty standard for US english. It doesn't seem to mind that I'm Canadian.
I am interested in possibly developing with the sdk in the near future (maybe just sound, or maybe also something with skeleton tracking if I can figure it out) but I have some real work and various summer activities coming up so nothing is going to happen fast in that department. I certainly will do some more tests and a bit of reading and I'll report back any useful information I dig up.
Could you please post a link to the amazing E3 demo that you were talking about?
The sample skeleton tracking app that comes with the sdk works great and is quite fun and amazing. Totally useless by itself of course, but good for a laugh, and encouraging to see how well it works. The only other app that comes ready-to-run with the sdk called "sample shape game" crashes as soon as I try to launch it. (Win7 64bit)
sample shape game - here work fine, win7 64 bits too....don´t crash for me...but it´s basic game...
Quote from: jitterjames on June 16, 2011, 11:35:29 PM
I would not rush out to buy a Kinect at this point if I were you. I just installed the sdk (which includes an audio driver to be able to use the kinect array microphone in any program, including VC) and in terms of just using the microphone without any special software running (I need to look into this) I am not very impressed. I am sitting 5-6 feet away and it doesn't seem to understand a lot of simple commands. As soon as music starts playing it understands nothing! :bigno Maybe I am doing something wrong, but I was hoping to be impressed and so far it's a big let down.
I should say that I did create a new speech profile and I configured it to use the microphone as type "other" which is what we should use for a microphone array. I did not do any training, but I generally can create a profile and go with other microphones because my accent is pretty standard for US english. It doesn't seem to mind that I'm Canadian.
I am interested in possibly developing with the sdk in the near future (maybe just sound, or maybe also something with skeleton tracking if I can figure it out) but I have some real work and various summer activities coming up so nothing is going to happen fast in that department. I certainly will do some more tests and a bit of reading and I'll report back any useful information I dig up.
Could you please post a link to the amazing E3 demo that you were talking about?
Hi james, Hi Wanilton ... (and hi kalle should you read this :D )
http://youtu.be/77c2S0V4__w This is part one of 5 I think of the E3 Microsoft press release (you can click/find to the next parts I guess) ... try and watch it as a hole as some parts are not so intresting but overall it's an awesome release.
About the SDK honestly I would be ONLY intrested to use kinect as a mic array. Well ... array ... I was told there was only 1 microphone in the kinect, so you could not really talk about an array. Perhaps thats the reason why it is so crap James ?
I really hope that kinect will be the solution many of us need to FULLY integrate programs such as Vox, XBMC, EG, etc ... into our dialy lives and routines ... Fingers crossed.
Quote from: Wanilton on June 17, 2011, 12:17:51 AM
sample shape game - here work fine, win7 64 bits too....don´t crash for me...but it´s basic game...
Wanilton, do you really find the Kinect microphone works "fine" with speech recognition? I can't even get it to do the training because it has to think long and hard about every sentence. This is usually a sign of a very bad microphone. I had similar problems trying to do training with Bluetooth ! I recorded my voice and played it back and it was not too bad sounding, but kind of hollow with a mild tin can echo. I need to try from different distances and listen with headphones to get a better idea...
@Auri, it does have a 4 microphone array. This is supposed to ultimately work as a single microphone though. It uses multiple microphones to do beam forming and noise suppression. (It is supposed to guess where you are and listen only to sounds coming from that direction.
You can learn more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microphone_array
I still think that if you are going to have a Kinect hooked up and burning fuel you might as well use skeleton tracking as well to improve the functionality, even if it is just to make motions that turn VC on and off. I don't know if it is also possible for it to use the skeleton to improve beam forming.
... But if I can't figure out how to get better performance from the microphone, my Kinect is going back in the box - until someone gives me a 360 :biglaugh
Thanks for the update either way James and Wanilton.
I just pray that you'll adjust some setting somewhere and that it will magicly become an awesome microphone for VC over night ;)
/fingers crossed
Peace,
Auri
I had a chance to play with it the Kinect SDK a bit more today. All hope is not lost! However, it will certainly not be as simple as "throwing a switch". It looks like it may be possible to adapt VC to make use of the SDK, gaining access to more specific Kinect audio properties and the acoustic model. It might also be possible to define a "green zone" by saying "I'm over here" and then only accepting commands from that direction (give or take a few degrees).
Assuming I can figure this out it seems like we may get decent results. The problem is that I'm not allowed to develop this stuff for a commercial product like VoxCommando. Eventually Microsoft will release a commercial SDK, but I have no idea what kind of costs would be associated with that or how it would work.
If anyone knows of a way to get around this without breaking any laws I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. In the mean time I'll experiment when I have time and try to educate myself. That's the goal of this beta SDK release anyway.
I was hoping that we'd simply be able to use the Kinect device as a microphone without any special code or license, but that doesn't seem to work very well. If you actually listen to the sound that is recorded it sounds pretty bad. I'll probably upload some sound samples at some point.
Wanilton, Did you have to install visual studio express 2010 to be able to install the kinect sdk? I am trying to install it on my laptop for testing with the minimum amount of extra software installed, but I get an error when I try to install the SDK. Some bull about not having access rights to a dll.
J,
I Installed Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition, and SDK install fine for me.
Today I desinstall SDK and install drives from Kinemote, and work fine too...in this moment i will test all possibilities...the Kinect is new hardware to me..i need explore a little,
but is fun using kinemote, with XBMC, little stranger in a first moment, but work fine. ;D
W
hmmm. I have Visual Studio 2008 installed aready, but I can't install for some reason.
edit: pretty much as soon as I start to install the kinect SDK beta I get the following error:
error writing to file: INuiInstanceHelper.dll. Verify that you have access to that directory.
then whether I hit "retry" or "cancel" I get this error and then it quits
The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2350
Hey James,
About the use of the SDK free beta towards commercial software.
What if ... you would code something with the use of the SDK and the lets say .. give it to wanilton who then ... lets say made a"free" plugin for the software he really loves ... lets say Vox Commando ?
Would that be OK for the microsoft licensing model/EULA that is on the SDK ?
Just thinking out loud here.
Quote from: jitterjames on June 18, 2011, 12:09:35 AM
hmmm. I have Visual Studio 2008 installed aready, but I can't install for some reason.
edit: pretty much as soon as I start to install the kinect SDK beta I get the following error:
error writing to file: INuiInstanceHelper.dll. Verify that you have access to that directory.
then whether I hit "retry" or "cancel" I get this error and then it quits
The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2350
I found the solution. I installed .net 4
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17851
then I was able to install the Kinect SDK with no problems.
Very excited about Kinect developments - the major barrier for me (and I suspect many) for using Vox Commando is the lack of a microphone that can somehow filter out the ambient noise and stop VC from taking commands from it. Very hopeful that this 'green zone' idea could be the answer
VC functioning freely and naturlly, combined with integrated motion control of xbmc, and i'll be some kind of home media jedi.
Quote from: iswasdoes on June 19, 2011, 05:03:25 AM
Very excited about Kinect developments - the major barrier for me (and I suspect many) for using Vox Commando is the lack of a microphone that can somehow filter out the ambient noise and stop VC from taking commands from it. Very hopeful that this 'green zone' idea could be the answer
VC functioning freely and naturlly, combined with integrated motion control of xbmc, and i'll be some kind of home media jedi.
+1 to that, amen !
It looks like there is some potential for the Kinect, but if you don't already have one, I think the Amulet is still going to be the winner. The Kinect might be more "fun" to use at first, but in terms of a home theatre setup, the Amulet is just much more practical. Also, I can take my Amulet out onto the deck with me. Unless you already own a Kinect, the price is comparable.
Quote from: jitterjames on June 19, 2011, 10:18:59 AM
It looks like there is some potential for the Kinect, but if you don't already have one, I think the Amulet is still going to be the winner. The Kinect might be more "fun" to use at first, but in terms of a home theatre setup, the Amulet is just much more practical. Also, I can take my Amulet out onto the deck with me. Unless you already own a Kinect, the price is comparable.
Well james ... those not on continental US are not able to get an amulet remote short of visiting US and buy it while being there :(
So for europe the "easiest" way would be a kinect if it does the job!
Quick question also James or other Kinect owners, do you know if the current kinect 'for xbox30' will be the exact same as the future kinect they will release for PC ? Will they just release PC drivers for windows and then you have to buy a kinec for 360 or will it be new hardware ? Anyone got ideas on that ?
as far as I know it is the same kinect hardware for XBOX 360 or PC. I would be wary if buying a used Kinect but with a new one it should not be a problem.
Hi All,
I hope this helps.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/KinectSDKQuickstarts
Keep up the good work.
Best Wishes.
James..
Quote from: Foggy on June 20, 2011, 07:53:14 PM
Hi All,
I hope this helps.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/KinectSDKQuickstarts
Keep up the good work.
Best Wishes.
James..
Wow that is amazing, atleast the last video "Audio Fundamentals" for sure might be usefull for James, specially the "Set AutomaticGainControl = FALSE" for use with Voice Recognition.
PS : Kinect owners ... here in Belgium there is a discount action this week where I can buy a Kinect for 99 Euro's instead of the regular 135 Euro's ... should I go for it ... or should I wait, I would only use kinect to have an open-air mic for XBMC and maybe control xbmc/vc/eg through skeleton tracking later on.
I can only speak for myself, but I have only rarely seen Vox respond to ambient commands and I have had a microphone very close to speakers. It is possible of course, but my experience is it is not as big a problem as one may expect.
Quote from: mclough6 on June 21, 2011, 06:22:17 PM
I can only speak for myself, but I have only rarely seen Vox respond to ambient commands and I have had a microphone very close to speakers. It is possible of course, but my experience is it is not as big a problem as one may expect.
So you are using kinect already as a mic for Vox ?
I should probably let McLough6 answer that but I don't think that's what he meant. I think he was talking about a regular microphone.
I have tried using the Kinect as a microphone with the standard version of VoxCommando and it sucks. It is among the worst of the microphones that I have ever tested and if there is any ambient sound it won't work reliably at all. If you want to use the Kinect to record your voice using sound recorder, you can expect it to sound very bad, unless I was unfortunate enough to get a defective model.
In order to make use of the Kinect with VoxCommando, I will need to write special code to tie directly into the Kinect features and I will need to use a special "audio model" which is provided by microsoft. I have done some tests with this (not actually incorporated into VC - just doing straight recognition of some test phrases) and the results seem pretty good... (but not mind blowing), even from 7 feet with music playing at a medium low level. I believe this "audio model" only exists in English at the moment, and who knows if Microsoft will ever expand this to other languages.
Honestly I dont' know what microsoft was thinking telling people that they can just hook up a Kinect and start using it with Windows Speech Recognition, because the results are simply terrible. They must be masochists, trying to undo all of the hard work they have done on WSR and also trying to destroy the good hype that Kinect has got going on.
I also just discovered that Kinect SDK does not support open dictation. All commands have to be predefined. So doing things like google search or asking VC to translate a sentence will be impossible, but pause, play, play artist David Bowie, etc. commands will still work.
I don't recommend buying a Kinect! Maybe later...
I was responding to iswasdoes comment on page one. I should have been more specific.
Ok thank you all for your insight and I will follow your advice for now James and not invest in a Kinect.
I truely hope something mainstream as a "plug&play kinect" will be the answer to the heavy need of a good "open air" mic for vox, albeit with some extra coding or ...
I will follow your progress in that matter closely if you are still willing to invest time in it James.
Regards
Auri
I have a Kinect and I am interested in it, so for sure I will play with it when I have time. I hope to have something for people to test by end of July but I'm not promising anything! Also it will probably not be complete on account of the licensing issues. It would have to be a demo of some kind. Or a scaled down free version.
Quote from: mclough6 on June 21, 2011, 06:22:17 PM
I can only speak for myself, but I have only rarely seen Vox respond to ambient commands and I have had a microphone very close to speakers. It is possible of course, but my experience is it is not as big a problem as one may expect.
I too have used a regualr mic with fairly good results, but even one false command can ruin the experience, and I recieved quite a few unwanted pauses, track skips and so on. I also had to shout quite loud to make my commands heard.
QuoteIt looks like there is some potential for the Kinect, but if you don't already have one, I think the Amulet is still going to be the winner. The Kinect might be more "fun" to use at first, but in terms of a home theatre setup, the Amulet is just much more practical. Also, I can take my Amulet out onto the deck with me. Unless you already own a Kinect, the price is comparable.
I don't know much about the amulet remote but I understand it is a remote with a mic in? Maybe im missing something, but for me the benefits of something like vox commando is to take the remote out of the equation. If I have to carry a remote around with me to make commands, I may as well press the buttons!
Obviously I get that even having to hold a remote VC offers a great shortcut for many commands and is more fun to use, but I think the goal of the software would be to allow a user to make complely natural voice commands with no peripherals on their person. I think that James would agree that this would be the ultimate. Its a shame that kinect is not a fast track solution to that as I think many hoped it would be as it was seemingly designed with this use in mind, however I have hope that further experimentation with the device will unlock new possibilities (paticularly with the gesture commands working in parallel).
All I can do is wish James luck, and look forward to a later release after some experierimentation with kinect with some optimism,
OK,
Anyone who has a Kinect already and wants to be an alpha tester, please send me a pm. I don't want to post anything on the site because of licensing issues.
the alpha may or may not work for you, but it will have the following limitations due to limitations of the current beta SDK provided by Microsoft.
1) English only. I don't know if this means that you need to have english on your OS or if english needs to be the current display language. You can test this for me. This shouldn't be a big deal since most of us are using it in English mode, even if we are using other languages. But it may require you to switch to english as your display language.
2) No dictation commands. All possible commands need to be specified so open dictation is not possible. In other words, "google search: the speed of light" type commands won't work.
3) No acoustic echo cancellation. (probably). There is a bug in the SDK. If you try to enable AEC when you don't have some audio playing from your PC it won't work. It won't generate any kind of error message either so it just seems as if your Kinect is broken.
4) Groups. Turning groups on and off may be disabled in the first alpha. I'll have to rewrite a lot of code to get this working again. Same goes for confirmation grammars and WMC play song "xyz" by current artist command.
5) Delay. I've noticed a small but annoying delay with the Kinect using speech recognition. This seems to be "built in" and you'll notice it with the samples provided by Microsoft in the SDK.
the first test I create will try to indicate your position relative to the Kinect but won't actually do anything with the data (yet). Later we may only react to commands coming from certain directions.
As for gestures, to the best of my knowledge the SDK only supports full body skeleton tracking, so unless you want to be standing, at least 8 feet from your Kinect to watch movies, with no other obstructions like coffee tables etc... :bonk :bonk :bonk I need to look into this more. The SDK provide two sample tracking applications and both use full skeleton tracking which won't turn on until it can see your whole body.
Are you excited? :P
oh good. It looks like I might have been wrong about having to see your whole skeleton. That could be great, raise your right hand to speak?
You don't need to track a whole skeleton but it still isn't much of a practical solution because
1 - it doesn't track very well if you are sitting in a recliner, maybe sitting up on a couch, but that's not how I watch TV!
2 - I seem to recall reading somewhere that Kinect does all the "heavy lifting" but as soon as I initialize the skeletal tracking, my cpu usage shoots up to about 25% (i.e. equivalent of 1 core on my phenom II 965).
so has anyone tried VoxKinecto yet?
Did not have the time yet today, our new born was asking alot of attention today, but tomorrow I will spend some time playing with voxkinecto ;)
I'll keep you up to date.
Hi James,
Very quickly tried it out. Thank you for your efforts.
Your hand gestures for on / off works very well.
Voice recognition - I have to agree with your thoughts. It works when there is no background sounds reasonably well. However not really useable if there is.
Can you explain what the figures are at the bottom of the screen?
I will have only limited time to do more testing for the next few weeks. But I'll be keeping an eye on the forums.
Best wishes.
James.
I'm really disappointed and I doubt I will go much further with this unless something changes. There are just so many difficulties associated with it, and not enough pros to make it worth while. The audio just doesn't seem to perform anywhere close to the way it is supposed to. When all is said and done, all the technical mumbo jumbo explaining why it's so great doesn't mean anything because it doesn't actually work!
the 3 numbers at the bottom are (from left to right):
the angle the last command came from
the minimum angle accepted
the maximum angle accepted.
so if you set Min to -5 and Max to 5 then you need to be more or less in front of the microphone or it won't execute your command. Try stepping to the left and you should see your angle go down to a negative number. If you wanted to accept commands only from the left side of the room you could set Min to -60 and Max to 0.
when I say "left" I mean your left, when you are facing the microphone.
Thank you for the explanation.
That makes sense and appears to work
When I have no sound - sitting in what I think is the Center it gives me +4
moving to the left gives me -1 and moving to the right +9
all these figs are averages.
If I switch on the sound I get approx -6 -13 figures. I am assuming that is because I have a bias on my left rear speaker because I am kind of deaf in that ear.
I'll try recalibrating my speakers again.
Switch off sound.
Sit where I would normally - take note of the figure shown and use that as my Center and try and use a smaller +/-
when have time I'll report back.
Best wishes.
James.
Hello J,
Send me VoxKinecto url for download, please.
thanks,
Wanilton
Not sure if this would help.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com:80/Forums/en-US/kinectsdkaudioapi/thread/d007edcb-649a-4ecb-a712-fadedb036e90
Rymixxxx,
The functionality you request is not currently available from SDK. You could use the NUI API from the SDK to get position of the player (using SkeletonData information), calculate angle of player's head from kinect device based on skeleton position, and then set MicArrayBeamAngle accordingly.
Sounds like a good idea as you have already defined the head in your gesture program.
Best wishes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1RIh6GdRYjY (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1RIh6GdRYjY)
Leap motion
Something to keep an eye out for! Doesn't appear to have a microphone though. More information here (http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57437404-76/leap-motion-3d-hands-free-motion-control-unbound/)
Kinect for Windows: SDK and Runtime version 1.5 Released
( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kinectforwindows/archive/2012/05/21/kinect-for-windows-runtime-and-sdk-version-1-5-released.aspx )
Now that Kinect for windows is becoming usable, any interesting ideas Kinect / Vox projects.
For example, it would be nice to say, "good morning computer" and have it recognize that it's you and say "good morning John" and then run some scripts.
Quote from: mparks on May 21, 2012, 06:49:10 PMFor example, it would be nice to say, "good morning computer" and have it recognize that it's you and say "good morning John" and then run some scripts.
That would be fucking awesome!
But I doubt that James would be able to do such a complex thing, he is not such a good programmer... :P :P :P :P (Just kidding :biglaugh)
Seriously speaking, that seems to be very very very dificult, but if James wants to try it, I will think on buying an Xbox Kinect just to help him testing! For now you should start testing if the new SDK makes speech recognition better than before. If they have improve it and considering that Kinect now knows Spanish, I will perhaps buy one to try it. James, let us know if you start playing again with Kinect! I'm really interested in your results ;)
Many thanks and best regards,
Aitor
I might not even use the speech recognition part of Kinect because my headset already works very well with vox, but it would be cool to get it to be more personalized, It can trigger an even when you walk in the room but not for other people and know that it's you when you ask it questions. That kind of stuff would be very cool.
Quote from: bodiroga on May 21, 2012, 08:37:00 PM
That would be fucking awesome!
But I doubt that James would be able to do such a complex thing, he is not such a good programmer... :P :P :P :P (Just kidding :biglaugh)
Seriously speaking, that seems to be very very very dificult, but if James wants to try it, I will think on buying an Xbox Kinect just to help him testing! For now you should start testing if the new SDK makes speech recognition better than before. If they have improve it and considering that Kinect now knows Spanish, I will perhaps buy one to try it. James, let us know if you start playing again with Kinect! I'm really interested in your results ;)
Many thanks and best regards,
Aitor
I think this is not really the old kinect for XBox, this one is a new development and cost 250$. if I understand it correct. They use new cameras with other resolution. As far as I knew, was the language used by windows api, so there is probably the language contained in the software, which worked before only with the ultimate version of windows.
Kalle
Quote from: mparks on May 21, 2012, 06:49:10 PM
Kinect for Windows: SDK and Runtime version 1.5 Released
( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kinectforwindows/archive/2012/05/21/kinect-for-windows-runtime-and-sdk-version-1-5-released.aspx )
Now that Kinect for windows is becoming usable, any interesting ideas Kinect / Vox projects.
For example, it would be nice to say, "good morning computer" and have it recognize that it's you and say "good morning John" and then run some scripts.
Haha, here is way to do this without a kinect ;) (edit "john" with your name). Perhaps you find some other ways to do similar and post it here.
Kalle
PS: If you say "good morning, good evening, hello", VC welcomes you and asks you who you are. If you are "john", VC ask you what he can do for you.
If you are not "john", VC said "I would not like to talk with strangers" and going in OFF-mode to protect your system for control it with voice.
Quote from: mparks on May 21, 2012, 10:47:11 PM
...but it would be cool to get it to be more personalized, It can trigger an even when you walk in the room but not for other people and know that it's you when you ask it questions. That kind of stuff would be very cool.
I don't think the 1.5 api for kinect offers this functionality. It does not do facial recognition or voice recognition as far as I know. It can apparently do face tracking, but that is not the same thing. Of course software exists for both facial and voice recognition, but it is true that this is beyond my ability!
Of course you can introduce yourself with a "catch phrase". Each person can have their own catch phrase, without actually saying their name. I could say "hiya hot stuff" and it would know it was me, and not my wife.
If it works well the facial tracking could be very useful. For one thing, it could only listen when it was able to recognize a face that was looking directly at it. If it is accurate enough this would work really well. I don't much like any of the kinect tracking though because it puts too much stress on the CPU which is generally not a good thing for an htpc that is running for long periods of time. It creates heat, wastes electricity, and potential makes your system less responsive, and could potentially even cause problem with playing video if your system is not powerful enough.
I did not look at the new api yet but I think it still lacks the ability to do dictation, or to learn your accent, which is pretty lame.
Thanks for the insight guys, you make some very good points, it looks like we still have a bit of work to do. Thanks Kalle for that script, i'm going to play with it this weekend and see what I can come up with.
PS. There is a new player in town who is looking to take on Kinect.. It's called Leap Motion ( http://www.leapmotion.com/ ) they're pricing it well so that's a good start.
Leap Motion sounds interesting, but i don't think it's a big advantage for Vox or HTPCs in general, because of the small range it uses to recognise the gestures (in comparison with kinect or a webcam).
but at this price I'm probably going to get one anyway ;D
yeah, leap doesn't look too useful for your typical couch potato.
Imagine the possibilities though, for people who know how to use sign language!
Hey I got myself a Kinect for development with my HTPC... So if any one wants me to test anything, I''m also keen... :)