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The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
Comments
I have 1 question/remark though:
These 2 points are obviously linked to each other.
But first of all, most users only have 1 Homey
And because of that, we can't place it somewhere close to where we will be giving the voice commands.
And that's what I'm seeing when I give a command up close or farther away. Up close the orange ring fluctuates very visibly. But when you're further than 1 or 2 meters away, it hardly fluctuates at all, like it's not hearing anything.
So that's why I was thinking it's not because of noise or bouncing voices, but just simply the volume that's too low?
It raises a few questions or reactions, hope you can comment on that.
i use dutch. So in many normal sentences one of the key words are on the end such as"zet de lampen aan/uit" or "zet de lampen op rood".
the sentences should be normal like you talk to people, otherwise we are adjusting to homey, instead of the other way arround. As @emile said, it must be usable by his or my mother.
using the phone app for speech is not a real option I think. Because getting the phone when at the dinner table , open de app, and say the command is not a real improvement compared to gettting my remote and switch on the lights.
furthermore, to control the tv with homey it must be in front of tv, putting him in de middle of the room could be better for voice, but not for IR.
Also I found out something which I think is also one of the problems.
I have a pre-listening sound and post-listening sound.
i noticed that when I'm further away he ends listening when in the middle of a sentence. Closer that problem is less often.
could it be the case that he listens too short and that we can extend that with a few seconds?
Personally I got perhaps a 10% success rate even though the Homey is only 30 cm away.
Took a short video to show u. It's a bit dark but u could see that Homey is approx 10 cm away from my playbar which is playing music at the time of recording. Mesa sitting exactly 5 meters away from Homey (measured!) and facing Homey when I speak.
My Homey is in about the same position as yours, underneath the tv, but when I'm in my seat about 4m away it doesn't fluctuate like that at all... And it doesn't understand a word I say (/speech-input doesn't even show any results). And that's with the TV off.
After that, I've asked a few times on Slack but nothing has been communicated on this subject. So now the questions;
- Is the chip being utilised right now (I hope not, that would mean the recognition probably won't get much better and we'd better give up on it)
- What about that external company?
//Edit:
Just thought up another question; I like how Athom has you (someone working full-time on this). But why don't we ever see any updates about the voice recognition in the weekly status reports? As stated earlier, Athom has been dead-quiet about the voice issues so I personally had already given up on it.
Just to recap:
Our homes are noisy and we have too much echo.
Athom does not have the resources to tackle the issue.
There is no solid plan how to fix it.
Be positive it works for some people.
We need to learn how to speak.
Sell this on the open market.
Homey has two microphones that could help to reduce the noise.
I have dead silence in my room, so nothing is wrong with the environment here.
I took homey into an almost echo free room (Kids bedroom, lot of things all around, fabrics, carpet, tonns of soft toys), yet no improvement. Anyway the echo should not be the issue every home has echo so Athom should work around and not the user or the interior designer.
Tested Google now in the livingroom from 5 meter distance and it works. So please don`t hang on the explanation that mobile devices works because of the small distance.
"These companies have typically trained their models with close mic samples". Of course that is how you do any kind of base sampling. Very disappointing.
Have you been trying the Google speech recognition for Homey and if yes how were the results? I think Emilie mentioned that somewhere. It works really well on my phone, even if I am 3-4m away .
I did a simple test (in Dutch) and took the examples from Athom's website. I made sure the room was quiet and I spoke in a normal speaking voice at a distance of 1,5 m from Homey.
To be sure it wasn't me, I retried with someone else.
I say: Noem een getal
Homey heard: een getal
2nd try: een getal
I say: Geef een nummer groter dan 6
Homey heard: rotterdam 6
2nd try: wolven die 6
I say: Kop of munt
Homey heard: Kop of munt
2nd try: Kop of munt
I say: Wat is je ip adres
Homey heard: wat is jouw e-mailadres
2nd try: Wait is je ip adres
I say: Zet de led ring aan:
Homey heard: Herinnering aan
2nd try: ze met ring
When the room isn't quiet or when I am more than 3m away, Homey understands almost nothing.
Yes: https://www.athom.com/en/support/KB000037/
https://plus.google.com/110558071969009568835/posts/Hjscz7h5MvF
Sure! If I get around to it I will post a video later this week.
We did test the Google speech api, but we came to the conclusion that the extra time and costs involved mean it is not the right choice to implement Google STT at this time.
Maybe it is an idea to let the threshold be adjustable for geeks, so we can experiment with that.
In the mean time if change some of mij short words like "eten" to "we gaan eten" and "eten graag". But no better results. The problem with the short listening-time is bigger/more when i use large sentence.
Maybe we can add the feature to let him say "sorry, i did not hear what you where saying" and then he listens again for another change to say the sentence. Instead of again saying "ok homey".
I also have spent some time reading about the Amazon Echo (Alexa) and when i read that, i'm afraid that homey wont be able in the future to listen 90%. Why? Because the Echo has 7 microphones in 7 directions. That must have a reason. Maybe we can get better results if we would know where the mics are in Homey, so we can move it a little bit with the mics to meat the livingroom.
Also a good sollution would be, if homey wont be able to listen better in the near future, that it could work with Echo (DOT). Then we have to pay 80 euro and we can use the speech engine from them. Maybe Athom can sell them as a package deal with some other stuff.
Although i bought homey mainly for its voice support, it has also the capabilities to talk many device languages. So a good integration with third party voice recognition is a real option. For your bedroom, at near distance, homey can listen, but in a livingroom it seems not to be the case.
The only SST that works well with wide ranges of microphones (including single microphones) and noisy environment. Are you taking this issue seriously? Based on the improvement since introduction... Hmm.
If we want speech recognition buy echo.
If we want to use IR buy a Logitech hub.
+ a Zwave extender. If homeys 4 m range is not enough.
€300 + €140 + €80 + €40
Nice.
I think that this is a really good idea.
because getting Homey to listen with "ok homey" does also not have a 100% hit ratio
@Pils : Probably not the answer you are looking for but I posted a flow for the feedback in the Library / Flows that work topic: https://forum.athom.com/discussion/936/positive-flows-that-work/p3
Cheers!
Either it works from a distance or it doesn't. If you talk to it from really close, it might work ok...
This is interesting, because here it doesn't even work at 2 m in a silent room. Could it be that there is different hardware in circulation? I have one of the first devices.
I got a brand new Homey a few days ago and recognition is still very good.