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Disregard interpunction when recognising voice commands

RjdRjd Member
in Archive
I just made a discovery when defining custom flows with voice commands. For me it was new, or perhaps it is already known and could I have found it somewhere and did not look hard enough..
Anyways, I had almost written off Homey as I could not get my flows with voice commands to work, judging it to be, well, crap. However, then I saw somewhere that you could ask Homey about the time. So I tried that and it worked flawlessly and I was surprised..

So then after some more experimenting, and to make a long story short, all my trigger commands ended with a '.'. So as it turns out, voice recognition does not work well with interpunction, as I can't imagine voice recognition ever replacing the words 'period' or 'dot'  with a '.', nor will anyone ever want to say that. Once I figured that out it made perfect sense. 

So, as a quality of life point, I'd like to suggest to automatically strip interpunction from voice command triggers when defining your own flows (or at least under water when doing the comparison with the Strings returned from the voice recognition engine. I can imagine there are people who want things to look neat with interpunction and can get frustrated when it disappears).
It would have saved me at least some frustration and time and it might help some others as well. 

Comments

  • Fire69Fire69 Member
    I hope you don't take it wrong when I say this, but isn't it a bit stupid to use interpunction in voice commands?
    There's no intelligence here, he just listens for certain words...
    Whether your voice command would be 'can you turn on the lights please' or 'Can you turn on the lights, please?', there's no difference at all for Homey, you're just making it harder for him. :)

    It's even better to not use full sentences when you make flows with voice commands.
    Just do it like this:


    This way you have a much higher change that your command is recognized because it just has to understand these words in your sentence and you can even have some variation in your command which makes it easier for different people to use the correct command.  You don't have to learn the exact phrase to get it to work. :)
  • JerryvdvJerryvdv Member
    I absolutely agree with Fire69, I have all my flows set up in the same way. I rarely have issues with Homey not understanding the commands.
  • RjdRjd Member
    Oh, I am not taking it the wrong way and am very glad to read your suggestion! Didn't realise I could define the flows like that :) Will try it straight away. 

    And yes, using interpunction in voice commands isn't the smartest thing to do, but I did it automatically without thinking, so yeah.. 
  • RjdRjd Member
    Yup, loads better. Thanks! 

    I admit, I did not look much at the forums before posting this suggestion. Is there any place that I missed (through my obvious ignorance) where I could have picked up such tips & tricks?
  • Fire69Fire69 Member
    Glad to see it's working better now! :)

    You can join Athom at Slack, you can get info/ask questions/have some fun there :)
    https://developers.athom.com/slack/

    Or search the forum here, but don't use the search, it sucks...
    Instead, go to google and use site:forum.athom.com + what you want to look for
This discussion has been closed.