Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Google Home - TV False Alerts



Again....last night while watching TV my Google Home started bleeping as if I used the wake words.

I didn't hear anything said in my TV audio that would cause it to respond with the wake word acknowledgment beep. I was watching a show with my full home theater going: A/V receiver powering 2 front satellite speakers and TWO subwoofers. Nothing like "OK Google" or "Hey Google" was said in the program. Yet it went through those responses 3 times.

The G-Home (for short) is located on a chest 4 feet high,  next to my Echo but separated by 6".
The chest's inside my bedroom, next to the doorway which opens out onto the living room. The TV and sound system are in the LR, of course. The door is located in the center of my 1 BR apartment. This centralized location lets me get my voice commands heard by both devices easily.

Amazon's Echo has never behaved like the G-Home. Could the G-Home's mic sensitivity/two mic architecture be the cause of this aberration? The Echo has 7 mics, positioned around the top, while the G-Home's is on that wedge, slanting downward. Maybe that's part of the problem?

I'm going to try a little experiment: swap places with each other. The G-Home's closer to the door.





Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Google Home Weirdness

For the last two days while watching TV, my Google Home randomly responds with the "Accessibility Sounds On" beep. And not just a single *blip* once and awhile. Oh  no. When it it happens, it does it in bursts of  2 , 3 or 4 *blips*. And this is not some rare thing, it's been happening at least a dozen times in about 6-7 hours of viewing time over the last 2 days.

But unlike my Echo/Dot, it's not saying anything. No "I don't know that yet" or "I'm still learning new things."

Very annoying and disturbing at the same time.

My wake phrase is "Hey Google" instead of  "Okay Google".  I chose mine to reduce the syllable count. Oh, notice the usage of "wake phrase" in place of the Echo/Dot's term? Amazon's use of one word is SO much easier and elegant compared with Google's implementation.

Amazon was wise to pick single words, instead of two. I know A-lex-a is 3 syllables, but Ech-o is only 2, Am-a-zon is 3 and Com-put-er is only 3.

The Home's default is O-kay Goo-gle which is FOUR. How klunky is that?

Insteon

So I went from that pain in the ass, primitive X-10 system to Insteon 10 years ago. What a difference! Instead of the carrier current signal being blocked by the 2 phases in my home electric service, Insteon could jump over it with an RF signal. Insteon is a dual path system: carrier current AND RF signal. If one method won't communicate, the other takes over. And each device becomes another node. Yes, Insteon is a mesh networking based. Each module becomes a node redundancy it has a hub.

This is why I really like Insteon, it makes it a truly reliable system. Everything else is built on it. It exists outside a WiFi, Ethernet of Cloud-based network.