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Doubts about touchscreen and voice comands - Josepz - 01-24-2020

Hi

I have been using volumio as music player in my car, running it on a raspberry pi 3 with a justboom DAC zero hat,  and an amplifier plugged to the DAC.
I have a 7" generic analog video-in touchscreen,  connected by the analog output,  from the RPI3 to the touchscreen, to control volumio, and I can control it by web interface from any phone, connected by wifi lan to volumio's AP.

I used that stuff for some years, without any problem, and  I never think abut move it from volumio... but I need to divert the view to the screen every time I need play a song, up or down volumen, etc, and I feel it's time now to go one step ahead, adding voice control to my audio system.

But I can't do it with volumio, as far as I know... so I am looking for alternatives This was the  way I read about moode. It have good reviews, even better than volumio's.

So, I am thinking to move to moode, but I need to know if I can control the player with my analog 7"  touchscreen, and if it is posible to connect and control moode by voice, maybe by wifi, BT, or whatever, with Google assistant or another voice assistant...

Thanks for your help


RE: Doubts about touchscreen and voice comands - TheOldPresbyope - 01-24-2020

@Josepz

IMHO, you have two different questions here

1) Can you use moOde instead of Volumio with your current hardware?

Short answer: yes. Longer answer: yes, once you've configured moOde to use the same hardware.

2) Can you implement voice control of your car player irrespective of it being moOde or Volumio?

Short answer: no. Longer answer: there are API hooks in moOde (and, I assume, in Volumio) to which folks have connected various handheld controllers (IR or radio-freq). There are a number of open-source voice-activation software projects which could be tied to them instead, at least to implement simple commands such as: play, pause/stop, louder, softer, next/previous selection. 

I've done several different kinds of handhelds, and I've thought about the voice-activated control problem, but I decided I had higher priority projects on my docket. Maybe someone else has a ready-to-use solution.

Of course, this being DIY-land, you're free to tackle the problem yourself.

Regards,
Kent


RE: Doubts about touchscreen and voice comands - Josepz - 01-24-2020

Yes, I love DIY...
First, thank you for your answer.

The first question is solved; I will try to get moode working with my hardware, I never used moode, so I have no idea on how and what can I configure, volumio have a config.txt file where I can define the video and audio devices it should use on start... I will search for the moode answers.
The second one, some time ago I started a project to domotize my house. For little bucks, and spending a lot of time, I can turn lights, Air conditioners, TV's, blinds, etc on and off, even automatize this actions, and the shipment of notifications about the state on almost all devices in my  house. I can do it with my phone, tablet,pc, everywhere.

So, it's frustrating can't say "hey Google, play starway to heaven in moode" (or volumio) and have to search for it on the screen while driving...
I don't know if moode can be used as an audio BT device .. this will be a bad (because of sound quality) solution, but may work. Of course I can streaming from my phone to volumio, but again, I think send just the play command to moode and let it do the job, will be better for sound quality.

Again, thanks for the answers, I will search for rest api on both, moode and volumio, if there is nothing working yet, maybe the apis be a starting point


RE: Doubts about touchscreen and voice comands - TheOldPresbyope - 01-24-2020

Ah,
 
Quote:So, it's frustrating can't say "hey Google, play starway to heaven in moode" (or volumio) and have to search for it on the screen while driving..

This is full-blown speech recognition ala Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, or Google Assistant which handle the conversion of audio to text in the cloud. That's not going to happen in an offline Raspberry Pi solution.

Something like Snips.ai or* Rhasspy.readthedocs.io can create an offline listener to handle simple commands but they're not going to parse open-ended phrases like "play Bach's Goldberg Variation Number 3" or "play Stairway to Heaven backwards" (so I can hear the backmasking, don't ya know Tongue ).

The music player APIs for these simple commands are trivial. I wouldn't worry about them until I had a working demo of the voice recognition code.

Regards,
Kent

* correction added after posting: since the last time I worked with it, snips.ai got bought by Sonos. The makers.snips.ai portal seems still to be open but according to a third-party blog I just looked at, support for makers is being removed from snips at the end of this month. One more case of sic transit gloria Mundi.


RE: Doubts about touchscreen and voice comands - Josepz - 01-25-2020

Create an offline listener is unncecessary, I think...a  phone have access to the cloud, and it's possible to create an AP with it, where to connect the RPI in the car, (or if home, RPI can connect to your wifi)   and at the same time, keep it connected to the cloud by SIM card... theorically, should work. I use my phone to share my internet connecion to other devices often. Anyway, you are right, I will test if it's possible or not at home, creating an AP on the phone and connecting the RPI running the server that handle all my devices, and I will try some voice commands to see if it works, as it do with my router.


About this, I read is possible to integrate volumio (not sure about moode) in home assistant... and google assistant or alexa are easy to integrate in HA too...Well, it's time to make some tests...

Thanks for your support, you put some ideas in my mind to follow...


RE: Doubts about touchscreen and voice comands - TheOldPresbyope - 01-25-2020

Parting thoughts.

If you're going to use a smart phone to hook into the cloud, then I'd just run moOde in the car as a Bluetooth speaker and be done with it.

I have a personal aversion to tying up my phone this way and also to dealing with network dropouts when I move in and out of the cellular-service fringe areas around me. To each his own.

Have fun.

Regards,
Kent


RE: Doubts about touchscreen and voice comands - Josepz - 01-25-2020

Yes. I can use the RPI as a BT speaker, or even stream the songs to it, but for sound quality should be better if I use the RPI player directly, with the songs locally stored.
I never loosed the network signal of the smart phone, I don't think this can happen here... anyway. I just need access to use voice commands; music is stored in my phone's sd card and in RPI's usb pendrive. streaming, or BT speaker can be doing offline, but for voice commands I need internet connection, but just for some seconds.

Let's see if works... :-)


RE: Doubts about touchscreen and voice comands - vinnn - 01-25-2020

(01-25-2020, 09:31 PM)Josepz Wrote: Yes. I can use the RPI as a BT speaker, or even stream the songs to it, but for sound quality should be better if I use the RPI player directly, with the songs locally stored.
I never loosed the network signal of the smart phone, I don't think this can happen here... anyway. I just need access to use voice commands; music is stored in my phone's sd card and in RPI's usb pendrive. streaming, or BT speaker can be doing offline, but for voice commands I need internet connection, but just for some seconds.

Let's see if works...   :-)

You'd need an Alexa skill or the Google Voice equivalent for controlling mpd, neither of which seems to exist. Just needs someone to develop one but that's not really anything  to do with the Moode project.
The Moode Audio and Volumio (as you mentioned it) projects produce Linux distributions with particular package sets and custom web interfaces to control mpd and other included programs.  mpd is itself a separate project.


RE: Doubts about touchscreen and voice comands - Tim Curtis - 01-26-2020

Disabling the MPD playback UI is perfectly normal when a client is playing to moOde's Bluetooth, Airplay, Spotify or Squeezelite renderer.

What's the issue?


RE: Doubts about touchscreen and voice comands - Josepz - 01-26-2020

So, moode is basically the mpd player with a web control interface? This is even better.