Smart home artifical intelligence

Introduce home automation related software here.....
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dreamgreenhouse
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Smart home artifical intelligence

Post by dreamgreenhouse »

This is a project I've been working on (on and off) over the last few years. It started out as a natural language interface but it has morphed into something much more powerful. It basically allows me to query and control everything in my smart home (currently 78 device/sensors) and is also aware of the 70+ IP-networked device we have in our home.

It provides full text and voice control by simply chatting/talking to our home and this means anyone (trusted) can do it without having knowledge or skills. This knows about things like zones, outside, upstairs/downstairs, all of the attributes associated with sensors and devices (e.g. is a door open, lockable, when it was last opened, etc.) It also knows about lighting and whether it is dimmable, colour changing, etc.

It isn't a completed project but it's about 60-70% there and we use it every day now.

I've written the code so as to make it independent of our home. It uses simple configuration files, to enable it to work in any home and this works because of the technology abstraction I've used when building my smart home.

This also means I can run virtual instances of it and I plan to put one up on the web soon (based on web sockets), to allow anyone to play with it and see what it can do.

http://www.dreamgreenhouse.com/projects ... /index.php

Rob
AshaiRey
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Re: Smart home artifical intelligence

Post by AshaiRey »

Very nice site and very inspiring. Lots to read too. Makes me want to try this one out.
One question about the VR engine. What is the base of this one. I read it uses English but that's not acceptable for my wife. It has to be Dutch. Will this VR engine be able to understand Dutch (are there module for available) I ask this because under Windows 7 you have 2 speech engines. The one that supports Dutch doesn't allow for dictation so it's limiting to possibilities.
Bram
dreamgreenhouse
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Re: Smart home artifical intelligence

Post by dreamgreenhouse »

Thanks,

The objective of my website is to inform and inspire others into doing smart home projects, whilst researching the (self) build of my next smart home.

I'm sorry but the semantic and contextual analysis part is written to work with English language text only at the moment. It probably wouldn't be a big job to re-write it to work with Dutch but the English language is a often complex and I personally wouldn't have the time to do it or the required knowledge of Dutch to attempt it.

The voice recognition (speech to text) part is completely independent and I'm basically using Apple and Google technologies (iOS and Android native capability) to convert speech to the text that is fed into the AI engine. I'm assuming this part of it works with Dutch and many other languages.

Rob
AshaiRey
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Re: Smart home artifical intelligence

Post by AshaiRey »

dreamgreenhouse wrote:The voice recognition (speech to text) part is completely independent and I'm basically using Apple and Google technologies (iOS and Android native capability) to convert speech to the text that is fed into the AI engine. I'm assuming this part of it works with Dutch and many other languages.
Thanks Rob for the info.
I am reluctant to use cloud services for VR and translating to Dutch. Besides that there is often a noticable delay i don't like to depend on services outside my own system when it conserns my home automation. I live in an area where the internet connection drops from time to time.
Bram
dreamgreenhouse
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Re: Smart home artifical intelligence

Post by dreamgreenhouse »

Me too. I have built all of our smart home to avoid any 3rd party dependencies. I use a Vera Lite as a Z-Wave gate but only because it was quick and easy. All the other hardware and all the software has been built/written by me and could easily be replaced or replicated if need be. My whole smart home is 'stand alone' and even incorporates a 12V UPS (http://www.dreamgreenhouse.com/projects ... /index.php) to keep it running for several days without power. There are no dependencies on a network connection but it does try and use data from local IoT sensors and data feeds if available.

The focus of this project was primarily on text based interaction whilst away from home but it works equally well whilst in the home. I've used Google/Apple/etc. for the speech recognition because they can do it so much better than I can for now. At some point I will have portable devices in my home with a 'push to talk' switch and local speech recognition that will hook into this AI interface :-)

The main reason I built this is to provide an interface that my whole family (and any other trusted person) can use, one that doesn't require any learning, bespoke apps or other types of interfaces. Typically is uses XMPP (but works with any transport [protocol) to enable them to just chat with the smart home as if they were talking to a person, from any location. This interface is not used very often but it is there if need be. Whilst it can be used to control everything, it was not designed to be used to control everything.

I very much designed our smart home to 'just work' around us with minimal interaction. It provides a subtle and seamless layer of intelligence on top of the existing interfaces (switches, etc.) As an example, pretty much all of the lights in our home are fully automatic, using twilight sensor (http://www.dreamgreenhouse.com/projects ... /index.php) and detected presence/occupancy (http://www.dreamgreenhouse.com/projects ... /index.php) to intelligently control them. We hardly ever need to touch the light switches and NEVER use apps to control lighting! Remote control is not my definition of smart ;-)

I also did it because I like coding and it has been fun to do ;-)

Rob
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