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[JHC]

I purchased Media Center (V9) a couple of weeks ago after being totally blown away by its potential.

I was mostly interested in using it in a home theatre PC designed to be used (at least for the music part) "blind" -- that is to say, no monitor.

This weekend I whipped up a Media Center plugin and related tools to help me with this project and am now wondering if other people might be interest in it... there are a number of requirements but if people are interested, I'll take the time to package up a setup and some documentation.

Basically, the scenario is this:

I have a PC located in the stereo cabinet. There is a wireless keyboard (with multimedia controls) but no monitor.

I use the fabulous Girder tool which lets me map certain keys to certain commands.

The first part is the Media Center plugin. By typing SHIFT-F1 (you could pick any other key combination), the plugin for Media Center (I've called it VoiceAssist for now) responds by speaking and the voice reads out the current track information -- handy when I've forgotten who the artist is etc. (Microsoft Speech API is required for this and other components to work)

The second part is a little app that I again trigger with a key combination. (In this case, I trigger it with the Search key on my wireless keyboard) When the user invokes the utility, a voice-over comes on and asks you to select something to play. This can be triggered either while Media Center is already playing something (i.e. I've grown tired of what I'm currently listening to) or before Media Center is loaded. The utility can be set up with shortcut words -- so that typing XMAS plays a Christmas playlist for instance. Or you can type a=<name of any artist> and all music from that artist will start playing... and so on... many possibilities here. When you type the selection and hit ENTER, the voice reads back what you typed and tells you to hit Enter again if that's what you want to hear, or instructs you to type ESC to try again. If no matches were found against what you typed, the voice will tell you that too.

So, other things could be done with this, but I was just curious how many people out there use their Media Center in this way.

Jonathan

[sraymond]

Jonathan,

I think what you're talking about is great!  I'm really interested in the HTPC, and the functionality you descrie certainly makes MC more useful in such a scenario.

I'd love to see what you're doing.

Scott-

[JHC]

Scott,

Glad to hear some others are interested in the same thing.

I'm going to package the stuff into something useful over the next day or so and will let people have a go at it.

Do you have the Microsoft Speech support installed? If not, this is something you can go and get here: http://www.saraproft.lu/download/Sapi51tts.exe (It's about 9MB)

Jonathan

[JeffreyK]

I'm also interested in this - was anything ever packaged up?

Thanks!
-JeffreyK

[RobOK]

You should look at the PhatBox which has a cool implementation of a voice interface called SSA.

It loads up an MP3 library into your car and your car thinks it is a CD changer (with thousands of CDs!).  Voice prompts let you navigate by song, playlist, album, artist or genre.  A voice prompt is generated for each Album, Artist and Genre (not each song though).  If you are going through artists and hold down the search it will switch to alphabet:

"Steely Dan... Sting.... T...U...V... (release) ... Wallflowers".

Different "mode" buttons tell the unit (the headunit of your car stereo communicating to the PhatBox) to navigate by album, artist, etc. then you use the Next and Prev buttons to navigate as i described.

It is hard to explain... it works really well though! IMHO.

If only I could use MC to load the PhatBox.... hmm, I will save that for another thread.

Cheers!

[wrafter]

So - what became of this, if anything? Sounds as fresh now as it did back in 2002!