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Whistled Platform Upgraded With Word Recognition
An anonymous reader writes "A few weeks ago, Slashdot featured a cheap platform performing 80FFTs per second to recognize whistles. The platform is open hardware/open source and is aimed for sound processing projects. To this goal, the creator (limpkin) just implemented a simple proof of concept algorithm that will control your lighting once the platform listens to a particular word. A small video has been made to explain the basic concepts of sound recognition to encourage hobbyist to make their own."
Just sayin'
I now have a way to wipe all my drives and trigger my thermite detonators incase the feds come knocking.. now i just need to make sure no good looking women come near me so I don't wolf whistle... I think I'll be ok!
Great to see someone posting something 'open' like this, rather than patenting it & going on kickstarter...
Tea! Earl Grey! Hot!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Oh yea, it was:
http://www.limpkin.fr/index.php?post/2013/04/26/The-whistled%3A-how-to-remake-a-dozen-years-old-project-the-right-way
leads to
https://www.tindie.com/stores/limpkin/
which asks for anywhere between $23 and $45 hard-earned dollars.
Personally, I blame the NSA for not intercepting the original communication & redacting the ad.
Prior Art -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HVA5MuWy8o
Interesting idea, but I think there would be serious scalability problems. Imagine if this was in each room in your home, and the doors to the rooms were open. Whistling in one room would almost certainly trigger the lights in the adjacent rooms as well. You would run into similar issues trying to control multiple lights in the same room independently, unless you started getting into more complex whistle patterns then those shown in the video. In that case you would start to sound like a songbird, or maybe R2D2.
And finally two side notes...
Not for use in emergency situations while eating saltine crackers.
This method of controlling the lights would be extremely popular in the von Trapp house.
In the 1970s, a book was published entitled "How To Build Your Own Computer-Controlled Robot". In fact this was one of the books that first got me interested in computing.
The author of the book, a high-school student, built (with the help of his engineer father, I don't want to downplay that) a small robot that had obstacle sensors, light sensors, and some basic mapping capability so it could find its own charging station (not so different from a Roomba today).
But my main point is: it also had effective voice recognition, for simple commands. And the implementation was pretty simple: the audio input was amplified, then sent through 3 notch filters to separate high, medium and low audio frequencies. Each of the 3 frequencies was digitally sampled at about 40kHz. Repeated samples were averaged and saved in a table in memory.
The CPU (and remember, this was a 1970s-era CPU, if I recall an 8080a or a Z-80 or similar) constantly sampled incoming sounds, and when one sufficiently matched one of the stored templates it meant "command received".
It was a simple scheme, and it worked fine. I don't want to detract from this inventor, but in essence he is doing a similar thing. Except instead of using notch filters, he's using FFTs to do the frequency analysis and build (and then compare to) the templates. The ideas aren't all that different.
But personally, I think I'd prefer the old method, as it demonstrably worked at least as well as this, used only a few $ in hardware in addition to the CPU, and was pretty definitely less compute-intensive to achieve.
Keep in mind: that was 40 years ago. Maybe this newer approach has more potential; I don't know. But it certainly doesn't look much different at this time.
"Sexy Time"
you knew that one was coming.
http://21stdigitalhome.blogspot.ca/2013/06/vcp200-voice-recognition-ic.html
Might also be a problem if one did come close...
POTATO! Doesn't work...
Simon Phoenix, after reprogramming Dr. Cocteau's house lights;
"Nah, I changed that."
"Illuminate"
"De-luminate"
"Ah, Isn't that much better?"
(I swear, the US is looking and feeling more and more like the fictional "Greater SanAngeles" from the movie with every day that passes.)
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
...apparently. It's why they had to keep Kevin Mitnick in solitary confinement so he couldn't whistle launch codes into the prison payphones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick#Arrest.2C_conviction.2C_and_incarceration
/*Insert boring sig here*/
..if he could get it recognize, say. the sound of two handclaps...wouldnt that be something?
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
...the sound of one hand clapping.
/*Insert boring sig here*/
...where is that phreak now? What's his take on this?
Unfortunately the US has charged them with espionage, cut off their funding. And they have been forced to shutdown.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
The moment I have to blow anything to use a device I will retire and become a Luddite.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I want to hold out for snapping. Is there such a thing?