On 8/21/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Steve Prior</b> <<a href="mailto:sprior@geekster.com">sprior@geekster.com</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Steve Edwards wrote:<br><br>> Almost every room in my house has a phone -- if I could teach my kids to<br>> put them back where they belong.<br>><br>> This could easily be extended to recognize which phone was used so it
<br>> could control the Myth FE in that room.<br>><br>> Also, it could/should be extended to control x10 devices as well...<br>><br>> "To control the tv in this room, press 1. To control a tv in another room,
<br>> press 2. To control the outside lights, press 3. To control the<br>> sprinklers, press 4, ..."<br><br>A while back I was thinking along the lines of using a phone as a<br>home automation interface, though I was thinking of it in combination
<br>with a voice recognitition system such as Lumenvox. It occured to<br>me that when you want to turn the lights on, you don't really want to<br>pick up a phone, dial a special extension, and then start using menus.
<br><br>What I was thinking about was what if instead of a dialtone you are<br>brought directly to a home automation voice menu which works in<br>parallel with your normal dial plan. If you wanted to make a call,<br>just ignore the voice menu and dial normally. If you wanted to
<br>turn on the lights, just say "lights on." or somesuch. Having a<br>traditional dialtone seems unnecessary when you can get more function<br>instead.<br><br>The trick is doing this without giving up on the use of nice existing
<br>GUIs to manage the dialplan that we have now. I'd like some way of<br>merging in the "voice dialtone" function with the existing dialplan<br>such that initially both are active, but as soon as either a phrase is
<br>recognized or a button is pressed the system branches to one or the other,<br>but that button or phrase is passed through to the rest of the processing<br>and not just an extra prompt getting in the way.<br><br>Does this spark anyone's imagination or ideas to implement?
</blockquote><div><br>Sparks my imagination thusly:<br><br>Suppose you have a speaker phone in every room. When the phone is "onhook," Asterisk automatically opens up a call to the speaker and places it in the automation context. When you pick up the phone, it grabs a different line, and drops the automation connection.
<br><br>Now, you can address Asterisk by saying, "Computer, raise lights 20%" and impress all of your trekkie friends when the lights turn up.<br></div></div>