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Showing results for tags 'voice control'.
Found 3 results
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I have to face facts: my mobility is reducing a good deal more quickly than I'd like. And sometimes the mobility I do have is accompanied by a reasonable amount of pain. My memory isn't what it once was either. I regard this new phase in life as just another challenge to be faced and - if not beaten - then dealt with crisply. By accident I bumped into IFTTT. Also by accident we renewed our Amazon Fire Stick recently, and that comes with Alexa built in. Curious as ever, mucked about with it. Didn't take long to make the link between the two..... Yeah, I get it: ya don't get owt for nowt. There are - for some - security or privacy concerns which outweigh any perceived advantage. I accept that. But when you need to work out how to get back up again before bending down to pick up the hen's eggs: when, before descending into a trench, you work out which ladder will be the least painful to use: when you for the first time realise that you can't be sure who rang you when and on what date ... its time to harness a bit of creative thinking. Voice activation has to be part of my future because it will help reduce the number of sources of pain. Please can we discuss on this thread POSITIVE reasons for opting in to either IFTT and Alexa or IFTT and Google Assistant? Maybe there's another voice activated technology which you know about that might help control simple parts of our lives? -
Does anyone have any experience of writing new 'skills' for Amazon's virtual assitant, Alexa? My father in law has completely lost his mobility in recent months and is nearly dying of boredom so I've bought him an Amazon Fire 7 tablet so that he can listen to talking books on it. The tablet comes with the virtual assistant, Alexa, the same as on the Echo device but activated slightly differently. Alexa can be used on the tablet to activate Kindle and Audible books, but nothing that's not propriety to Amazon such as RBDigital that is available from public libraries. I've gone through the tutorial on the Amazon Web Service (and signed up for a free account there) but it doesn't seem to link in to specifying using another app on the device. Although my father in law could learn the tablet screen controls, he struggles with them due to his hands which are very large and now arthritic, hence my thoughts that voice controlled would be a lot easier for him. Any thoughts or hints would be much appreciated.
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Both Google and Amazon have recently released clients for their respective voice control platforms (Echo, Home) on the Raspberry Pi. This provides a fix for the big misgiving I have always had with these devices - The Always-On (or software controlled) microphone. Effectively you can now build a voice control device with a physically switched microphone connection and be certain no-one is listening in when they shouldn't be - I'm thinking a big red push-to-make mushroom button. I've spent a few hours playing around with the browser based Echo interface (echosim.io) and see enough possibilities to investigate further. It's clear that customising the experience by writing personalised Apps/Skills/Actions is going to make things a whole lot more useful, especially if integration with IFTTT (or similar) can be achieved. Does anyone have any experience of these devices (good or bad) and has anyone played with coding for these things ?
