This is the forum archive of Homey. For more information about Homey, visit the Official Homey website.
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
Homey's "Microphone Performance" or "Improving Speech to Text" (which was on the roadmap last year) seems to have vanished completely, and instead, we now get Alexa and Google Assistant integration (mind you: I think Alexa and Google Assistant integration is great, but not INSTEAD OF improving Homey's own voice recognition!)
Whatever happened to the "We've also played with Google's Speech API. It looks promising to increase the Text to Speech accuracy..." ? For me, several of the examples mentioned on Athom's Speech page simply don't work, because 6 out of 10 times, Homey's voice recognition won't recognize such sentences correctly.
for now it works 0% for me. even the trigger "okay homey" (worked before 1.0.1) isn't recognized here at the moment.
so i wolud go to amazon dot if athom would say: ok guys, we can't get it right, sorry. you have to use amazon or google for speech. but they say that they will polish the speech recognation of homey, but don't say when!!
my only requirement would be the ability to DIY e.g. the abiity to hack something together my(/our) selves
That`s not that bad, mine is much worse. They have changed the parser recently. Since homey pretends more often that it understood the question but it does something else.
Oh about the Google API, they scrapped that because `it takes much time` to implement it. What a rubbish! I can`t really tolerate when they think that I am stupid.
Speech related GitHub issues are ignored or just closed. So keep hoping.
They already improved voice handling in 1.2.x and are working constantly(!) at the server side to increase responsiveness and accuracy.
Voice is hard to filter right from backgrounds noises, it is like listening to a whisper voice from 1 meter away when a car drives by in a tunnel (echo), I would like you to show me you can do that.
And if you can, create a filter for it, on your own (yes, there is only 1 person working on voice, and it is not the only thing he is working on) within 1 year.
Even if they went the Alexa/google api route, that won't increase filtering!
Don't believe me? Try using voice with the mobile app.
It is using the exact same speech to text parser as homey itself, but works better since 1, noise cancelation of the modern phones is good on its own, and 2, the microphone is close by.
And athom isn't ignoring you, not too long ago there was a big response from athom about voice.. With this very same thing I'm saying now.
The only reason for them to include Alexa and Google home, is because they want to get all devices connected in 1 place.
A lot of people wanted a second microphone in a different room, and is exactly what they are doing with adding support for that, which is a lot cheaper and easier then creating your own second device just for voice.
homey delivers much other playgrounds at the moment...
1. Give up, and inform the users that it's not going to happen.
2. Fix it themselves (on short term, not 2 years from now!)
3. Join one of those big companies, and use their methods inside Homey, to improve recognition.
Whichever option they choose, I would appreciate it if they'd let us know (in one of their bi-weekly Software Updates) what their current status is, and how they plan to move forward.
1. Give up and buy something else.
2. Put Homey in the closet and wait for Athom to make Homey better then the rest.
3. Stop complaining and make the best out of it. There is so much fun with Homey and it will be better then the rest!
This is all because compairing Athom with Apple and Google is way off. Like compairing the old (or the new) Nokia 3310 with the Iphone 7+. Appels met peren vergelijken we call it in Holland.
I think if a product does not work as it is advertised the customers have right to complain.
And @Rododamelshe, I guess you also missed what I wrote in option (3)... Athom clearly doesn't have the resources to create their own voice recognition services that are on par with those of those three big companies. So why not use the technology of one of those companies, instead of trying (and apparently failing) to reinvent the wheel with such limited resources?
"If you can't beat them, join them!"
The same point can be made about option two. About option three. You're right, of course. But in that case, Athom should stop advertising Homey as being able to understand voice commands. And they're clearly not doing that...
when athom began, there wasn't even a alexa (publicly) or google home.
And apple's siri is and was still closed source, only by hacks is it usable.
And they aren't reinvent the wheel, they are using a good(!) (not by arhom created) speech to text service, but still lack a little of the FILTERING of the audio that is send over there.
like i said before, if the filtering is not good, then your parser doesn't matter what you use, even if it is alexa, google home or even siri...
and sure trying to Compare (yes you are comparing)
Athom (with only 18 employees, and only 1 working on the voice with limited resources)
to something like
Google or Amazon (that can have a hundred people busy with voice, and have thousands of dollars to spare).
and even they don't have Dutch voice recognition...
amazon is already saying since the beginning that they will support most languages, but it's here now for 2,5 years and only 3 languages are supported... where there are 2 based on the English type.
go start complaining at them that they STIL don't have a dutch voice recognition after this much time.