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The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
Is there A problem with the Homey microphone?
Arthur27
Member
From the beginning I had a lot of problems when speaking to my new friend Homey. Almost nothing was exepted. Not in Dutch neither in English.
Now I have the app on my IPhone and it almost works flawless. So I am wondering, is they an issue with the microphone of the Homey. This since speech recognition works on the iPhone but not when talking directly to Homey.
There is one exception and that is when I am very close to Homey. Than it works, not always but better. But when further away than 50 cm than it really sucks.
Would appreciate to receive some feedback from the developers if this an issue under construction or is it staying like this. Don't want to use my phone when sitting in the same room with my new friend.
Now I have the app on my IPhone and it almost works flawless. So I am wondering, is they an issue with the microphone of the Homey. This since speech recognition works on the iPhone but not when talking directly to Homey.
There is one exception and that is when I am very close to Homey. Than it works, not always but better. But when further away than 50 cm than it really sucks.
Would appreciate to receive some feedback from the developers if this an issue under construction or is it staying like this. Don't want to use my phone when sitting in the same room with my new friend.
Comments
So the good news is, i think it is not the hardware (alone), because it has worked better than it does now. But the sad news is, that it never worked good enough to be used in real life.
Also i noticed a bug when i was testing this. I mean the ios app and homey itself. When talking to app fist, it responds by talking to my iphone. But when i say "ok homey" to homey (from very close), it responds thru my iphone instead of thru it's own speaker. Also when not using the app anymore.
There is also a learning option to get homey better understand your voice. I didn't check that out yet so don't know if that will work.
Also splitting the flow tends to do better. So in stead of the <you said something>"...." change it to <you said anything> and <it contains>"..." and <it contains>"...."
The good news is, this can (most likely) be fixed with a firmware update
So personally I don't think they can solve it for everyone. I would suggest that everyone is talking to homey using their phone and have a great working speech recognition instead of trying to command your homey without and have a big fail rate.
But you're right about the second part... when you talk into your phone, the distance to the microphone is lot less, which definitely contributes to the fact why voice recognition of your phone is a lot better.
And allways talking to your phone is not an option for me, as i'm happy to put my phone down once in a while, and if it's charging ...
Lets see what "Improvments" can do and than everyone can choose if the will there phone as a primairy ,
So it may be true that a big portion of the problems is in the translator.
Disclosure: The following are my personal toughts XD
Though I don't really thing the problem is in the mic hardware itself, but rather a not so optimal implementation of the mic inside homey. I read they actually spent some good care in selecting a high quality mic. But Mister High Quality Mic might suffer a bit from sitting inside a big echo shell without sound isolation together with 2 new rather noisy friends, Mr and Ms springs (antenna's, you can actually hear the springs resonating when homey speaks).
A other thing is that I personally found homey to listening a bit better when standing on top of something soft/sound absorbing.
And a room with lots more echo seems to make it worse for me. The homey are our office is much harder to become friends with then at home in my super sound absorbing ger/yurt tent.
Edit:
One thing I DO find improved though, and I would like to mention this, is the "Ok Homey" trigger.
Both our homey's seem to get almost none false triggers anymore compared to the past where I would get one almost every 2 sentences I spoke to someone. Playing music used to be almost none stop triggers.
I have to yell at HOMEY before he hears what.
Athom said this month's ago and in the mean time I didn't see any big improvement on the mics/speech recognition. Maybe better said: there's room for much more improvement.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/athom/homey-the-living-room-talk-to-your-home/posts/1523076
Results in the form of:
What I said
homey: What homey heard
mobileXXXX: What the phone heard
is it going to rain
what are you
What is the temperature at this moment
I have a question about thermodynamics
homey: i have a question should we arrange
Turn on the livingroom lights
Turn off the livingroom lights
homey: turn off the lights
What is your purpose
homey: what is your wish
Is it going to rain in the next 30 minutes
What is 22 times 23
Small test, but in conclusion: there is absolutely no difference if you take out the distance variable between your phone and your homey. These samples were spoken around 3 meters from Homey/phone away. I do not think homey and phone use different text2speech interpreters, nor is Homey's microphone significantly worse or better than my phone's.
That second part is much more important: when talking to your phone you always have it close to your mouth, which makes speech-to-text dead simple.
Hearing a person from across the room (especially with background noise and/or echoes because of the walls) is much more complicated. Close-by these side effects are neglectable, but when trying to record a person talking across the room eliminating those other sounds is much more important. As you can imagine, most speech-to-text services aren't being configured get that right, because there aren't that many speech-to-text products that try to understand people from across the room, and speech-to-text is hard enough as it is. We're trying to improve the situation by using a dedicated preprocessing chip which can do some pretty neat stuff, like microphone beam forming and noise cancellation, but of course the configuration of that chip can always be improved.
when he said
because I thought this was about replacing Homey's current speech-to-text functionality with the Google API's speech-to-text functionality (and the latter should already be what is used on Android phones, right?)
And yeah, I do assume the "Text to Speech" in his sentence was supposed to be "Speech to Text", because text-to-speech is not an issue.
We have a number of reasons to do that, like being able to switch speech-to-text providers very fast, comparing the results of different stt providers and/or postprocessing the text (e.g. in a context of lights, 'red' is much more likely to occur than 'read', so we could replace that on our side already). In this case Emile was talking about switching our servers to use Google's Speech API, which might yield better results in some cases.
edit for me the recognicion is bad.
homey does not understand me at 2,5 meters. only if i shout he listen.
oke homey however works fine.
whit version 0.9.1 the recognicion was fine for me...
But one way or the other... nobody at this forum had the same experiance...
It is bad this way...... very very bad
It was located on a small table against the wall next to my couch, a bit cornered.
A couple of days ago, as a test, I moved it to the other side of the room, same height against a wall but nothing to the left or right.
It's still not good, but the recognition is much, much beter, even when talking from further away (not far, 1 or 2m) !
Also, the orange rings now 'responds' a lot better to my voice, like the volume is higher although I talk from further away.
So I don't know the details of the microphones, but the location of your Homey seems to be very important...
I think they need to do a lot of work on the software for the microphones, noise cancelling and stuff...
Love these videos of Alexa which looks like working better (haven't seen / experienced it live but I bet user experience with speech is better).
Please be careful with these movies. We have seen movies of Homey with perfect speech, KaKu indoor ranges of 30m+ through thick concrete walls, read stories about perfectly working presences detection, brilliantly working IR, etc
So please be careful with movies of companies which want you to sell something
Try talking to it from max 50cm away, Homey will understand you almost perfectly.
The problem is that it doesn't seem to capture the sound from a distance.
And only for certain people, others have no problems at all with it.
Should switch to google or amazon recognition.
Try using the app and check the /speech-input page. If recognition is OK there, the problem is with the microphones, otherwise it's your pronunciation. Maybe your relatives' English is too 'flat'
Oh yes there is no issue with the app, that works perfectly like it should. I reckon that uses the google speech to text engine.