Voice Remote

Remote at the tip of your tongue!

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Inspiration

The idea for this app came from when my Grandmother, who is suffering from Arthritis, came to visit us during the winter break. Watching her use any tactile device was a pain as she winced whenever she had to press a button. While brainstorming, we thought why not come make something that can make lives easier for people.

What it does

This app uses the Infrared capabilities of android devices to interact with TVs and function just as a remote would. The twist here is that to use this remote, all you need is your throat. Tell it what to do and leave the heavy-lifting in its capable hands.

How We built it

We began by looking into how the ConsumerIRManager (introduced in Android 4.4.x KitKat) worked. Following this, we started researching on how TV remotes worked. Finding that, we wanted to emulate the pulses sent by a standard TV remote. We came upon the fact that using Pronto Hex codes, It was incredibly easy (comaparatively) to convert the command into a pattern of pulses that the TV could understand.

We went to work with Star Sight, the first set of codes we found. We found a list of channels here, and used it as out sample set of channels to work with.

Challenges We ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was understanding how we could turn Pronto Hex codes into pulses. We had found some sample code but we didn't know the theory. Understanding this theory was key, since we knew that to build a robust application we had to know every detail behind it. And sure enough we found that our frequency was off by a factor of 0.241246.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we used this opportunity to create a tool that could make lives easier for everyone instead of going along the trivial route.

What We learned

During the last 12 hours, we learnt how Remotes interfaced with other devices and how we could emulate it on an android device.

What's next for Voice Remote

We plan to continue working on this project after the hackathon and implement an always listening mode and an understanding of context of speech.

The next remote you buy would reside inside your phone and respond to the commands to speak to it. It would be like having an assistant just for operating your TV and other infrared controlled devices.

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