Dienstag, 9. August 2011

Benefit Project Completed

After more than a year of hard work we - the simon listens Team - are proud to announce that the Benefit project to use simon among other open source technologies (XBMC, Ubuntu,...) to create an affordable, self contained, voice controlled multimedia solution especially suited for elderly people has been completed.
The created solution - including the speech model and scenarios - will be released under a free license very soon.

But in the meantime, you can already have a look at a short demo video on youtube:



(Planet readers, click here)

4 Kommentare:

Anonym hat gesagt…

Very awesome work, but,
Why xlr? why full HD?

Unknown hat gesagt…

FullHD: It works with other resolutions too but we recommend a full HD screen as they are relatively cheap already and while the UI is automatically downscaled is you go for a cheaper panel, it's optimized for 1080p.

And we need to use XLR because the microphones we are using only provide (mini-/) XLR connectivity (absolutely normal in professional audio equipment).

Anonym hat gesagt…

I'm just concerned about the cost, especially for elderly people, an XLR to mini-jack adapter would be cheaper than a new sound card.

Unknown hat gesagt…

The internal sound cards - especially on nettops / netbooks and cheap laptops - are usually of quite low quality and introduce a lot of artifacts.

As we wanted to keep recognition rates high, we decided early on to use an external sound card. For this we also tested other solutions like XLR->USB converters (which contain their own sound card; if you want I can dig up the list of evaluated products).

But the end result of our test was that the recognition rate increase of something like the io|2 justifies the (smallish) increase of the prize (around € 100).

All in all (including PC, TV, microphone, sound card, TV card, panic button, etc.) the solution can be bought for around € 1000.- - if you cut a few corners, probably even less...