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Vox Commando and Mediabrowser


lja

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Have any MB users tried Vox Commando? I noticed that there is a poll on their website to see if there is any interest for a plugin which would provide the ability to voice control MB. Here is their website:

 

http://voxcommando.com/forum/index.php?board=47.0

 

More exposure for MB???????

 

POLL

 

http://voxcommando.com/forum/index.php?topic=1620.0

 

Previously pledged

Edited by lja
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It would be great if everyone could go voice their support, whether you plan to use it or not.

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BATTLE DONKEY

Where do I find the poll? Do i need to create an account to see it first? I'm on my phone and trying to click at the bottom where it says poll doesn't do anything

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Where do I find the poll? Do i need to create an account to see it first? I'm on my phone and trying to click at the bottom where it says poll doesn't do anything

Added link to first post.

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Folks - since this is a kickstarter-esque setup where they are asking you to pledge a $ amount to 'vote' for the plug-in, Luke and I will pledge to match all of y'alls pledges for the MB 3 plug-in up to a cumulative total of $100.

 

So, if 20 of you pledge $5 then we'll match all of that.  If more do it, even better :).

 

Please post a screenshot of your pledge for MB in this thread.  Thanks.

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jitterjames

Thanks everyone for the warm welcome. At the moment I'm just trying to familiarize myself with MediaBrowser since I've never used it before. I hope it's OK if I ask a few dumb questions on this board.

In case anyone is still confused, here is a direct link to the VoxCommando plugin pledge form.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1OhMRjVUD5vCQebjnMpygMOm0mCEt8spHG84cVxgs27U/viewform

It should work on mobile devices too.

First question... What client are most of you using with MediaBrowser?

TIA for your help.

James

Edited by jitterjames
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Welcome JitterJames!

 

We have several client options and lots of people using different ones.  From our statistics the order of popularity (measured by number of devices) is:

 

MB Classic

XBMB3C (yep, you read that right)

Roku

Android

MBT

Win RT

iOS

WinPhone

 

But those are subject to juggle and evolve.

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Spaceboy

Well I gave it a $10. Now what is vox commando?

97e54c12cdc73e0093e2e945fbcb124d.jpg

84c12c42cce941e2094f1b450afdd6e2.jpg

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Edited by Spaceboy
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jitterjames

I will let you know if I decide to commit to making the plugin, and then ask that people honour their pledges at that time.

 

VoxCommando is a multipurpose voice command platform for Windows (Vista and later) that is highly customizable and works with a lot of different programs, services, and devices.  It would be nice to add MediaBrowser to the mix as I think it would be a really good fit and benefit both communities.

 

lja kindly linked to our wiki above but you can also check out my Youtube channel which has a lot of demo and tutorial videos.

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5bR_Jcv6lk3ubiNzdgOIGQ

 

To be clear, we are talking about creating a plugin for VoxCommando that will allow it to interface with (query and control) MediaBrowser.  We are not talking about a plugin for MediaBrowser.  So you will need to run VoxCommando.  Currently it costs $40, but you can try it out for free.  Just go to http://voxcommando.com/downloads.asp

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jitterjames
I have been playing around with the .net ApiClient for MediaBrowser as found here: https://github.com/MediaBrowser/MediaBrowser.ApiClient in order to get an idea of what will be involved in making a plugin and to see what will be possible.

 

Please forgive (and correct) me if I am using the wrong names for things since this is all pretty new to me.

 

It is wonderful to have access to this ApiClient for developing in C# and it will make life much easier for me compared to rolling my own Rest commands.

 

This api looks very promising and I have seen good results when doing tests to control the web-based "dashboard" client and the MediaBrowser Theatre.  

 

Because MBClassic for WMC seems to be the most popular client, I was hoping to make it a priority and test against that.

 

In order to make usable voice control for MediaBrowser I need a few things to work reliably and some of them seem to be missing.  I will be very pleased to be corrected if I am wrong about any of the following, which is more than likely. 

 

This has been my experience so far with MBC:

 

- Browsing to any item works, which is awesome! :D  This is something that is not so easy to do with most other home theatre programs.

 

- It seems that MBC supports only a few of the "basic" commands with ApiClient.SendCommandAsync().  The list for XBMB3C is similar but I'm not sure if they work.



GoHome, Back, DisplayContent, DisplayMessage, GotoSettings, Mute, UnMute, ToggleMute


We can't navigate or control volume, or use keyboard emulation.  Is this going to change in the future?

 

- I am not able to queue items at all and I am not able to play more than a single item.  This is fine for movies but makes using it for music kind of hopeless.  If I try to play an artist or album or instant mix it only plays a single item.  The same thing seems to happen with XBMB3C.  This is really a major issue when considering making a voice control plugin for MediaBrowser.  Please tell me this works and I'm just doing something stupid!

 

- Similarly, it seems that I can play a playlist but it also plays only the first item.

 

I have one question.  Is it possible to interact with (query/control) a plugin such as MBPlus through the .net ApiClient in order to, for example, request a smart playlist from MBPlus?

 

I am using the following versions:

 

Windows 7 ultimate x64 SP1

MediaBrowser server Version 3.0.5347.22095

The .net Api client that I downloaded from github and compiled last week.

WindowsMediaCenter for Win7 version 6.1.7601.17514

MBClassic version 3.0.206.0

Edited by jitterjames
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jitterjames

Sounds cool, I'm definitely in. I've been trying the kinect plugin to achieve similar but struggling a bit

 

What have you been struggling with?

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jitterjames

Thanks for the update Chef.

 

I would still like to hear from the users of your plugin to know what they think.

 

I think your approach is very different from how VoxCommando does things and in many ways your plugin might be better in terms of a tighter integration with MediaBrowser and the context of where you are in the navigation.

 

I guess the main reason to make a plugin for VoxCommando would be so that you could control a bunch of other stuff outside of MediaBrowser as well, and to be able to customize your commands more.

 

We do have support for different languages in VC but because most media titles are in English, English is still the easiest language to use.

 

Since version 2 of VoxCommando you have the choice of using either the System.Speech or the Microsoft.Speech engines.

http://voxcommando.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Version_2#Choice_of_speech_engines

 

I have not experienced the 300 limit that you mentioned.  I have never tried to create 300 grammars, but  I have created a single grammar with thousands of choices (example: "play song X") using both engines without issue.

 

I actually prefer the System.Speech engine anyway and it allows for dictation.  For me training is not required, but the option to train for 5 minutes is a good thing IMO.

 

You can use any microphone including a Kinect with VoxCommando but we don't do anything special with the Kinect.  It just acts as a microphone and the noise cancelling capabilities are not great.  I tried writing a custom program to take advantage of the Kinect's features and I did not get the kind of results I was hoping for so I decided not to waste too much time on it.  Maybe things are better now with the newer SDK.

 

Face recognition is very interesting to me, although I don't much care for the CPU usage which I imagine is quite high.

 

Standing up and waving my arms around is not how I want to use my computer because I am too old and lazy...  ;)   If it could work sitting down without running my CPU ragged it might be interesting but I always found that the motion tracking was too awkward.  This is of course just my personal experience and opinion and if other people feel differently I am happy for them.

 

I still mostly use my Amulet, but we also have the VoxWav app for Android.  It might be cool if the MB3 app for android could have the microphone option built-in so it could behave similar to VoxWav.  I have never actually used an open air solution with the microphone across the room that worked reliably enough for me to be enjoyable.

 

By the way, do you use your plugin to control music as well?

Edited by jitterjames
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Spaceboy

Sorry been meaning to come back and say on the kinect thread, your last fix pretty much got me there. Everything works except I get an error when I open the speech tab from recollection. I'll try and take a look tonight, it's difficult getting time :)

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