Homeseer is a great application for automation around the house. It has the ability to understand voice and trigger commands and actions in response. For this to work we need to capture the voice and feed it into your homeseer pc. One way is to use specialist and often expensive microphone/mixer systems, or if your on a budget I’ve discovered a simple and cost effective way to achieve a similar result.
The idea is to use skype as a tool to capture your voice commands and send to to your homeseer computer. Why skype? Its free and available on all platforms, which means this solution works from iPhones, iPads, Android Phones, tablets and PC’s.
Step 1
Lets assume you already have a skype client installed on your mobile phone
Step 2
Install skype on your homeseer pc and create a new skype account. I also recommend configuring skype so that it will auto answer calls from your accounts that are in use on your mobile device.
Step 3
VAC (Virtual Audio Cable) is the program that does all the work, you’ll need to download a copy and configure it as per the screenshot below. Leave the program minimised as it needs to remain running in the background
Step 4
In windows control panel, open your sound settings, in recording devices set “Line 2″ as your default recording device.
Step 5
In the homeseer speaker client, set the “Audio Output Device” to “Line 1 (Virtual Audio Cable)”, then restart the speaker client.
Step 6
Configure skype as per the image below.
Step 7
Make a test call from your skype client to your homeseer PC and check all is working correctly. Homeseer should now take voice commands from your skype session.
Anyhow I thought it was time for an update. The current version has been re-written in VB .Net. New features include triggering events at sunrise/sunset, current weather reports, Text to Speech and Intelligent Speech Recognition so people can interact with the system using only voice commands.
