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Is There A Market For A Voice Controlled MP3 Car Stereo? 234

Posted by Cliff from the would-you-buy-this dept.
big_hairy_mama asks: "I'm the author of MP3VoiceControl, a software package based on IBM's ViaVoice. As it was designed as an interface-free car stereo (in addition to being used at home) and allows you to search for and play all your MP3's completely without the use of a keyboard or monitor, I am seriously considering starting a small business to build and sell voice controlled MP3 player units. My project is called called EmVAX, short for MP3 Voice Activated Car Stereo. This is similar in concept to EMPEG's units, except a lot cooler, and I am confident that I can produce my box at about 1/3 of the $1500 price tag of EMPEG's similar unit. My question is, how much of a market is there for this type of item? How much would you be willing to pay for 140 hours of continuous playback with an easy-to-use voice-activated and voice-searchable system? Is the impress-your-friends factor enough of a selling point so that people will shell out $600 bucks for my unit?" Very cool. I'd love to have one of these, but at $600US a pop, I think I'd have to see one in action, first.
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Is There A Market For A Voice Controlled MP3 Car Stereo? More

Is There A Market For A Voice Controlled MP3 Car Stereo?

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  • Re:Conversation Changes Songs? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    learn esperanto!

  • Re: noise cancellation (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    (ok you have some due to the reverb effect in the car - but the level will be really low).

    You obviously haven't done much work with acoustics.

    The speakers, amp, and acoustic environment of a car do horrific things to the relative phase of every frequency component the car uses. Just subtracting out the original signal doesn't work in a car. (In fact it doesn't work even in an anechoic chamber because a lot of the phase shift happens in the speakers and microphones.) To cancel this effect in real time you would meed some MASSIVE dsp--more than the average PC can do.

    Commercial noise-cancellation headsets really don't work well, and they basically don't work at all at high frequencies. This technique is difficult to say the least.

  • Re:Conversation Changes Songs? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    actually isn't the biggest problem that it uses a hard disk to store the songs? I don't remember them being too prone to shaking. In fact, my computer stops working, whenever I kick it. It's my version of booting up.

  • consumer electronics sweet spot (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think the sweet spot for high volume sales is $199. Intro price can be $299 for early adopters and those for the need for new gizmo. It all depends on what sort of volume you want to sell and the profit expect per unit. I think you will need to put in some spreadsheet time to develop product feasability.
  • I used ears (word recognition) and festival+mbrola (speech synthesis) to make a car mp3 player last summer. You could select a playlist, and it would then pick random songs from the playlist. After saying the name it would listen for a command (stop, play, or skip) and would then exit to select another playlist, play the current song (which was the default if nothing was heard for a few seconds) or skip the song and pick another.

    Ears doesn't have a very good success rate. Festival works well, though. I kept everything mounted read-only or on a ramdisk so I didn't have to fsck. It was pretty cool. I got to talk to my car. :-)

    This summer I plan on using ViaVoice, and enhancing the interface.



  • Um, I would sell my left......

    kidney for one!

    Where can I send the check? ;)
  • Adding features to digital products is relatively easy

    Which is why it's rather unfortunate that we're going to have to buy entirely different units to take advantage of different features like voice-recognition or digital radio or whatever.

    I'd much rather pay a bit extra to get a generalized system that could be upgraded and enhanced. Why not simply a "ruggedized notebook" whose components are designed to fit into a car? Commodity parts running a standard os, attached to whatever specialized peripherals are necessary (dash-mounted LCDs, a sunvisor mic for voice-recognition, etc.) would be way more flexible, and probably be cheaper than custom-designed hardware.

    In other words, solve all the _general_ PC-in-a-car problems -- power, connectivity, resistance to bumpy roads -- with a single 'reference pc', then let the user and third-party companies add whatever hard/software they need for themselves.

  • I paid $600 for my car CD player last year. :)
  • Not without a description of its size, the connections it has on it and whether it has an externally accessible drive (floppy, zip or CD ROM) I would want to see a demonstration of this in action before I fork that much.
  • Here in the Netherlands we have to use a carkit for our cell phones... high end radio's are equipped with control units which switch off sound if a call comes in. I would like to see the EmVAX equipped with similar technology... maybe just one microphone would be needed for both EmVAX control and Cell Phone control. Sure would like to buy such a thing... And if prices could be reasonable... not as expensive as the EMPEG...

    As far as i'm concerned.... go for it!
  • I wouldn't have imagined voice recognition could cope with the requirements. It's bad enough when you're talking into a headset microphone in a quiet environment. If this is anywhere near usable, I'm impressed. If it's usable without training, I'm very impressed.

    I can't reach the site, so I can't tell if it's supposed to respond to commands like "Play Misty for me" (my initial expectation), or if a handful of preselected commands are all it recognises ("Next song", "Playlist 4", "Pause", etc.). That would be a bit less impressive and a lot more plausible, actually.

    All that aside, I for one won't shell out $600 for this thing, or even $200, because I'm content with just listening to the radio on my short commute.
    --

  • Re:Voice Technology (Score:3)

    by GeorgeH ( 5469 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @11:10AM (#1106171) Homepage Journal
    I don't think IBM would appreciate him selling/licensing their ViaVoice to other people. Maybe I read that wrong, but it looks to me like he's using ViaVoice...
    --
  • the stereo's an odd size as an anti-theft measure

    Are you sure it isn't a "keep you from buying a stereo from anybody but Citroen" measure? They aren't the first/only car company to get proprietary in that area by a long shot.

  • Perhaps he's one of the people like me who listens to the radio ONLY in the car.

    Sure, you could record radio shows at home. The thing is that a device like this is purely a convenience item in the first place, so why not make things as convenient as possible.

    When talking about toys and convenience items like this, the word "need" has no place in the conversation. These things are about fun and "coolness factor."
  • First off, I would think that a unit like this is going to have to be fairly complex to sort out the music playing to the commands being spoken by the operator. If you can do it under $600....more power to you.

    Secondly, what type of capabilities are we talking about here. I want a unit that can handle audio cds as well as data cds holding MP3s plus have a storage area of its own as a repository of MP3z. Maybe if I knew that it was a kick ass unit that did everything that I wanted, I might shell out $300-$400. But not $600
  • I think there's a market here, in fact I was looking at buying two. One for each car. I was going to build one for myself first, (since I have the parts) to see if it worked well. (In a convertible)

    I think that it should be easily expanable, and that you shouldn't profit gouge on hardware.

    Other than that, sell me one.

    Shaun
  • If been looking at this for a bit, and common question keeps popping up. How does it know that you're talking to it?

    Every command starts with the phrase "Computer" and has to follow a pattern of commands.

    The website says that you can change that command word, and even the syntax of the commands. Give the player a name, and you'll never have a problem during converstations.

    i.e. "Eythel, play Oh ef ef es pee are eye en gee"
  • How do you get the damn thing to turn the volume down once you've cranked it up?
  • Fot those who makes fun of Citroen, there's more:
    Citroen made a car with voice recognition and synthesis, that runs Windows...
    http://www.mandrakesoft.com/~gduval/ (in french)
  • According to the specs at this site [k12.wa.us] (which appears to be a mirror, or the original, unredirected site), it comes with a:
    Minitower case and power supply

    The idea is great -- I'd love to put one in my car. But, I really don't have room for a minitower.

    On the other hand, the MP3VoiceControl does look like a pretty cool piece of software -- I may just set this up in the living room for easy MP3 playing.

  • No CD based MP3 player will ever kill this unit or the empeg-car. If I am going to be spending more then $500 on a radio for the car, it needs to elliminate a few things. One of the things I hate is having to exchange CD's. This would still be needed for MP3 CDs. I enjoy listening to all my They Might Be Giants songs on shuffle, and one MP3 CD still would not hold them all. With my empeg, I have all of TMBG, and many other songs, so a genre or year shuffle is very possible and rather nice to have.
  • Lets do some basic math for the Smart media based players. I have herd of an upcomming player with 5 smart media slots for MP3's. A smart media card can hold up to 64mb, and cost up to $100. 5 of these will cost $500, and the storage will be 320mb. In the car, a decent sound system usually exists, so the tricks of the Rio players do of reconverting MP3's to 64kbps or 96 will definitly be noticed. So at 320 mb, you could fit a little over 4 CD's worth of music at a decent quality. And to have more music, you either have to buy more smart media cards, or keep reloading them. At that price, a 6 CD changer under the seat makes much more sense.

    The empeg on the other hand has a minimum of 6gb of storage at $1199 (Mark 2). It can easially be used outside the car as well. So, does a in car only smart media based player or CD based player offer more value over a player that can be enjoyed without the hassle of old media and in many places? Oh, someone made a case that turns the empeg into a portable player powered by a battery. So with things like that, I think my money is well spend on an empeg instead of an in car player, and a player for the home, and a player that can hook into a friends stereo easially, and ...
  • Oh, and another gripe... The EMPEG has a friggin SA-100 Processor in it! WTF! You can get MP3 decoder chips for cheap.. Why the overkill?

    Hmm, because MP3 won't be the only format people may want to use. While everyone else is having to upgrade their $600 MP3 PC in a trunk players, I will just have to download an upgrade to enjoy other future formats that will use more processor time. Also, the SA-100 200mhz is one of the cheaper processors for an embedded system.
  • The empeg Mark 2 ships June 9th, and empeg is predicting the queue will be run through by the end of summer, thus allowing non registered people to buy one. Also, you can still hop on the registration queue, and get one of the first Mark 2 units. Prices did change, and $1299 will get you a 12gb unit.
  • This person keeps forgetting some of the major differences between his player and the empeg. Size. My empeg Mark 1 fits in the dash. My empeg can be removed from the car at any time easially for security. My empeg can be used in the house easially. A PC box somewhere in the car has none of these advantages.

    Also, the sound quality of the empeg is great. The people who installed mine said it was the best sounding head unit they have ever installed. Also, the empeg is very powerful, and will play many future formats with no problem. MP3 and visuals uses around 20-30% of the CPU. The rest of that time on my unit is used to crack d.net RC5 keys. GPS and CDPD support is underway, and the people working on GPS plan on using the IR to beam maps to the Palm.

    The empeg is a well developed product. The prices will change with the Mark II. The Mark II ships June 9th with voice control, ethernet, and other new features. I'll probably see if I can get an Airport to work with the empeg while in the driveway once I recieve my Mark II. Also, I feel the price I paid for my empeg is well worth it. I didn't buy a simple MP3 player. I bought an in dash computer that runs Linux, and I can do whatever I want with, compaired to the similiarly priced AutoPC running WinCE.
  • A car system that works like the CD-based MP3 portable players (www.mambox.com) is a lot more practical than installing an entire computer inside a car. A unit that reads a CDR with mp3's is so much cheaper, cause you don't need a harddrive, motherboard, soundcard, operating system.

    "I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."

  • This makes me want to record interesting voice commands on MP3, and then putting them into the player.

    I can just imagine the track "Recurse", that holds my voice command "Computer, play track Recurse".
  • Is there a market for the "Salad Shooter," a device that turns cucumbers and carrots into little edible projectiles you shoot into a bowl?

    How about the "Clapper," a switch that turns on and off lights with the clap of your hands?

    People will buy almost anything if it's marketed right. Just ask Bill Gates. Considering that an MP3 player for your car might actually even be cool and useful, though, it might be a little harder to sell.

  • sweet, tnx for telling us. I've always loved Kenwood's quality, so i'll definetly consider this (would appreciate a link,...if I cant find it). The CDR/mp3 capability has some definite advantages. However, my primary motivation for an mp3 player is to have a HUGE collection of music EASILY (assuming the empeg UI is any good, which i'm not sure of yet) available at my finger tips. Having to insert or find CDs just isn't quite the same thing, even if it is 8x as much music as standard audio cds.

  • How do you control the player when you have music blasting at full volume? I think that a device that produces sound and is controlled by sound is a stupid idea.

    You need to have circuitry similar to that found in noise-cancellation headphones. In real time, take the input from the microphone, subtract the output of the stereo. What's left is the ambient noise (road noise, etc) and your voice. Apply a bandpass filter centered around the frequency of the human voice, et voila.

    With loud music, of course, you may have some trouble, depending on the dynamic range of the microphone/input signal.

    -bp

  • EmVAX? (Score:3)

    by dysprosium ( 12904 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @07:45AM (#1106190)
    Does it run EmVMS?
  • sounds like a good idea, but if possible could you make something that is not "in dash". I don't want to give up my CD deck to listen to sub CD quality music all the time....currently i just hook a laptop up to my amps to play mp3's on the road, but still have the option to play CD's if i want.
  • I would buy one if either the price is a bit lower, or the interface is exceptionally good.
    But as far as safety goes, "hands free" is the only way to go when I'm digging through a long list of mp3s while going down the interstate at 75+ mph... I am willing to pay a few hundred more for the ability to keep my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel.

  • Geez, I'd pay $600 just for a decent MP3-playing car stereo (with 140 hours of playback). Voice control would be icing on the cake. I'd love to buy an EMPEG, but $1000+ just to get a small disk is asinine. It costs $2000 to get one that would hold my MP3 collection.

    $600 is a great price point -- high enough that folks are serious about it (since it's new tech) but low enough that folks like me who don't have .com stock options lying around can afford it.
  • The new empegs have voice recognition software on it. Check out the new EMPEG Mark2 at http://www2.empeg.com/mark2
  • The fact still remains that this particular project is interesting to the majority of the slashdot readership, so whether it's a commercial enterprise or not, it's still interesting to hear about. OK, so the guy gets some info from us - I don't care *shrug*

    Take it easy!

    --Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
  • I've been playing the stock market with some seed money trying to build up enough to by an empeg (and still have some left to continue to play with). I'm about to my goal, but I'd MUCH rather have a voice recognition version, especially at under half the price.

    YES. Sign me up!

    -- Gary F.
  • if slashdot wants to become a forum for marketeer surveys and focus groups, maybe it should require that requesters pay the participants, just like in non-electronic forums. Most of these surveys pay $20

    <theory class="conspiracy">
    How do you know they aren't already paying slashdot ?
    </theory>

  • Yes, I would buy one (Score:3)

    by TeknoDragon ( 17295 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @07:46AM (#1106198) Journal
    I'm very impressed with the Empeg's player tho. They're coming out with a 2nd version with lots of nifty stuff.

    USB, 10bT ethernet, a better design and interface and as you mentioned, voice control.

    (having trouble accessing your site... host not found) If you could make an affordable and easily removable car mp3 player with USB and Ethernet and a remote that would be enough to convince me... but voice control would be damn cool too!

    I'm considering my first car and right now an mp3 player looks just a bit more attractive than a 6 cd changer.

    What would really sell your product is a slot loadable mp3 cd player. You can skimp on the HD then too (maybe none)! Finally 11Mbit wireless ethernet capability... perhaps a PCMCIA slot on the front! then you could use all sorts of media (SM/CF that standard handheld mp3 players use! or iomega click, sony memory stick (is there a PC card mem sick reader?), and wireless ethernet cards among other goodies)

    If your product had all that I'd almost be willing to pay the full $1500 for it!

  • I want one that reads from a CD-R.

    I don't want to have to remove anything and bring it in to the house to add tracks, I don't want a moving part that can break and be expensive to replace... I just want to burn some tracks onto a CD, and pop it in. I don't even care if this thing goes in my dashboard... (Actually, if it did go in my dashboard It would have to include a radio, which I don't think this one does. I need to be able to hear Ass Whippin' Wednesday on AAF in Boston!) Ideally this could act as a CD changer, and be controlled by a standard changer control.

    Why doesn't somebody make something like this?
    I've explored doing this on my own, but the cost is too high to build just one unit. Anyone out there want in on something like this? The price for an MP3 decoder/IDE bus /soundcard on a board probably would be affordable if ~30 people were interested...

    Oh, and another gripe... The EMPEG has a friggin SA-100 Processor in it! WTF! You can get MP3 decoder chips for cheap.. Why the overkill?
  • To reduce the total cost and the number total number of computing platforms that I have to maintain, how about turning the car stereo into just a docking station for a PDA? My Casiopeia E-105 already has a 64-bit 131MHz CPU, 32MB RAM, a 320x240 16-bit video touch screen and buttons.

    I want a car stereo box that has an adapter that plugs into my PDA's CompactFlash slot, power input and sound output (which is very high quality), and
    provides: internal IDE hard drive bay, some CardBus/PCMCIA slots, power (from the car's power bus), sound to the car speakers. Do not include the hard disk. The only silicon that the product should include are these IO interfaces (IDE, PCMCIA, CompactFlash in). Everything else, such as the hard disk or PCMCIA/CardBus toys that I want to plug in (like GPS or wireless ethernet) are commodities that you are not going to be able to keep up with. Leave most of the software development to the Linux PDA crowd as much as you can. Just make this simple product, and people will be able to do all sorts of cool things, and you will not have to be constantly revising your product or being chastised for having one particular component out of date.

    If you really feel compelled to include actual computer hardware in the product, I would suggest a built-in low profile DVD-ROM drive, and perhaps
    interfaces to the more common automative computer busses (to display gas mileage, etc.)

    If I had this product, I could do all sorts of cool things, like interface it to my car's computer, connect it to a cellular modem to do an encrypted telephone system that had a speakerphone feature through the car's speakers, pull weather forecasts from the net via a metricom modem, store a massive library of digital music, etc. The possibilities are much greater with this approach and the costs would be much lower.
  • Input from mike - (output from audio out * volume multiplier) = Everything but the speakers = your voice commands.

    It'd take some fine tuning, and some tricky coding, but it's not impossible.

    ---
  • Though it may be entirely possible to produce something like the empeg for a much cheaper price... keep in mind the amount of work that goes into putting something like the empeg into production. What if you have to sell thousands of these things? how will you make them? What about the machined parts? will it fit in a standard car audio bracket? Where will it go? What about vibration? Will you vibration test it, or will the drives just croak?
  • What I would like to see is a player for my Jeep that can read MP3 files off a CD changer.

    There are several problems with hard drives in the vehicle. The biggest is, how do you get the MP3's onto the hard drive? Fragility and lack of expansion are problems too. How do you manage deleting files and adding new ones when the drive is full?

    Solution: a 5 or 10 disk CD changer full of CD-R's full of MP3 files and playlists. That way I can create the CDR's at home, fill up a changer cartridge, and take it out to the car. I can easily add a new CD every few months as my music collection expands.

    The perfect solution would be if it could hook right up to my Clarion Pro series head unit with Clarion's own mobile-bus system. This would allow me to use the fast forward, rewind, skip, and shuffle controls directly from the existing head unit, without installing more "user interface" stuff.

    The user interface would be a bit tricky. I think it would be best to require each MP3 to be included in one or more playlist files. These would appear to be "virtual CD"s in the changer, allowing them to have names that would appear on the faceplate of the head unit. This might give a limitation of 40 playlists, but each playlist could have several hundred tracks in it.

    I would be willing to pay about $300 dollars more for this than for a regular CD changer. But I bet it could be built for a lot less than that.

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • I was working on a similar project, and had decided to use a different language to control the mp3 player. I ended up using spanish...but figured something that was COMPLETELY different would be better. I hadn't gotten around to learned swahili when I ran out of time to work on it.
  • Not only that, but when Sinead O'Connor sings the line "Nothing compares to you", the player starts the song over. Chicks don't like guys that get stuck in recursive loops.

    Other people have mentioned how the stereo creates sound and is also controlled by sound. I can say that my Samsung voice activated PCS phone (3500 something) does NOT do well if the car stereo is on at all. What you could have is a mute/command input button either on the unit or wired to the steering wheel. This would solve the background noise problem and the need for a command word prefix.

    -B
  • Hate to say it, but I'd really only consider it if it a) worked pretty well and b) looked good, like almost every car cd/tape player out there right now does. Otherwise, it'd just look shoddy and corrupt the otherwise decent dash of my car. :)
  • To make it really superb, add a wireless LAN receiver so when your car is parked out front, it can download a new batch of MP3s from your PC. Perhaps if you automated this (car flags songs as "played", requests new ones whenever it detects the LAN again) you wouldn't need 140 hours of storage, just 8-10 hours or so.

    Imagine: gnutella for your car wireless LAN so you can swap songs with the guy in the car next to you on the highway/at the stoplight.
  • I would plead for one thing - please make sure the command sequences are accessed by first speaking a command word, then acknowledging you are in "command mode".

    The most classic example I can think of here is Star Trek, where they say "Computer", and it responds "Boop-bleep" (or whatever) do let them know it heard them - then they can tell it to do whatever, it acknowledges that, and goes to work and stops listening. This eliminates all ofthe complaints of constant-on voice recognition.

    As a side bonus, I'd love to be able to use my Palm to beam it playlists or even as a remote control when I didn't want to talk to it.

    Also, please include a CD player that plays MP3 files - I can't get through to your site to see if you've thought of that already.

    Wait! One more thing - please include support for adding other formats as well, like the recently discussed open format that could replace MP3's (forgot the name already).

    Other than that, I've been yearning for a car MP3 player (I'm going to buy a portable CD-MP3 player mostly for that porpouse) and think there is definatley a market!

    Oh, one last optional feature would be nice - if I could add wireless ethernet so I could beam the car songs from my house.
  • found some info on these here. really nothing, just says there's one coming...I'll post more if I find more.
    "Leave the gun, take the canoli."
  • ERRR...

    http://www.maxtarget.com/hardware/cdrom/mp3_kenw ood.shtml#Index
    "Leave the gun, take the canoli."
  • > If I'm not mistaken, most voice recognition software makes you sit there for quite some time and program it so > it recognizes your voice... wouldn't you have to do this with this player? I've always wondered why one doesn't record one's voice to CD the first time you train, and then just pop in the CD after that. Hang on, lemme quick patent that.
  • I suppose it depends on your definition of boring. Nothing is that exciting in that sector of the market TBH. But the ZX performs well enough for its class, handles well (for a FWD family hatch, that is. I'm not pretending it's a BMW) and is comfortable enough. I like mine. Nothing like a Volvo, which tend to have only lipservice paid to chassis engineering but concentrate hugely on safety and interior space. Neither of which are bad things, but I don't need that much interior space and I'd like them to notice what happens to the wheels.

    Perhaps our original poster saw Citroen and assumed 2CV?

    Interestingly, you might want to check some roadtests for that period. I was looking for something 7-9 years old when I got mine, so checked group tests from back then. The ZX came out consistently at or near the top. Yet it tends to work out cheaper as the secondhand market don't really trust Citroens due to the hydraulic suspension on some models. Expensive to fix when it breaks, to say the least. Except the ZX has conventional springs :)

    I'm just as much of a car nerd as I am a computer nerd, and have been for years. Ran out of places to store old car magazines a long time ago. And I'd definitely recommend a ZX to anyone who wants an early-mid '90s family hatch. I didn't end up with one by mistake, I actively _chose_ it.
  • I used ViaVoice (the voive app here) a while back, and experimented with this sort of thing.

    It was trained with the stereo off, but one day I did some dictation with the stereo on. It's fairly loud and less than 2 metres from my computer to the nearest speaker. I think it was Deep Purple's Made in Japan, for those who know the album :)

    Anyway, it _didn't_ recognise stuff from the lyrics, though the accuracy did go down a little.

    What I'm wondering is how this is going to be practical. ViaVoice is designed around a headset with the microphone about a inch from your mouth. I would _love_ this sort of toy - and would pay that much - but I can't see where I'd put the mic that it could work. It wouldn't be acceptable to have a system which only worked if I was wearing a headset or throat mic. The website (http://ghs.ssd.k12.wa.us/~pdavis/projects/emvax.h tml will get you through, the link given above doesn't work) doesn't specify this sort of thing, unfortunately.

    The other thing that puzzles me is why ViaVoice? It simply isn't that good. Having used both it and Dragon NaturallySpeaking for a little while, I'd have to say that NaturallySpeaking is _far_ more powerful. Though ViaVoice comes with a better headset :)

    It might also be a bit of a problem fitting one to my Citroen ZX - the stereo's an odd size as an anti-theft measure - but if I could find a way then this sounds nice. Assuming it could have a radio with AM and UK frequencies, that is.
  • It's scheduled to come out of vaporware this week. I don't know if it will or not, but the Mambo-X [mambox.com] seems like a good bet -- it's actually a portable CD player that plays mp3's off a CD-R/RW.
  • Being the owner of an Empeg [empeg.com], I can tell you nothing compares as far as sound quality.

    However, it doesn't look like anyone here is actually in the know in regards to the next generation of Empeg, the Mark 2. It already has voice recognition - check the feature list [empeg.com] in the newsletters.

    The Mark 2 player will start shipping next month.

    And you call yourselves geeks! None of you even knew about this!

    Any $600 solution will be crap compared to the Empeg in terms of sound quality and usefulness.

  • The Samsung Linux PDA which was just mentioned in an Slashdot will be in that price range and will play MP3s. But its capacity will be smaller.

    Maybe you could make a general car interface for Linux PDAs, so we can connect to more storage, the car speakers, and whatever other gadgets are part of the car (GPS? Cell phone messaging/networking?)...and if there's a CPU in it then the car can also act independently.

  • He has also forgotten things like FCC regs which he will have to abide by if he is going to make this a product not just a hobby kit.

    Any piece of electrical equipment that goes in a car (or any where for that matter) needs to meet certain regulations.
  • If you try to market this to consumers, you've got a zillion challenges trying to break into the sales channel.

    But the auto manufacturers are another story. They want more high-margin, high-tech communications, navigation and entertainment devices in their cars, but are worried about the Feds blaming them for drivers taking their eyes off the road. Consequently, are very hungry for voice-activated technology.

    For example, GM already has plans to put a voice-activated cell phone in every car the sell (a logical enhancement to their OnStar emergency communications system). I'll bet they'd love to offer a Delco-branded voice-activated MP3 player.

    Get your fanny up to Detroit and talk to GM, Ford and DCX. That's where the real market for this is.
  • What's to stop the lyrics from changing songs??

  • Sure. (Score:2)

    by ryanr ( 30917 )
    I can't get to the site at the moment, but if it's comparable to what I've seen before..

    Sure. I'd probably buy 2 at $600/ea. The voice is a cool gimick..make sure other controls are there, too.
  • I think probably he used ViaVoice because it's freely available for Linux.

    Your post had some credibility until you told us you own a Citroen. That blew it - it's hard to go lower than Volvo, but you've done it. [grin] (My eight-year-old daughter wondered aloud the other day "Why are Volvo drivers always so stupid and slow?" I guess we're raising her right.)

    Not really to bash French cars (OK, yeah, to bash French cars) I'll tell a true story: In college, I worked for one of the handful of EPA certified emissions test facilities. Peugeot sent us one of the first new 505s with some engine change that mandated re-testing. The interesting thing was that *it wouldn't roll*! It took us several hours of trying everything (and we had several skilled mechanics handy) before we finally gave up and took it off the truck with a forklift. The next day, we discovered that some drunk Frenchman had somehow hammered the front calipers onto the rotors with the wrong pads - pads so tight that it took us half a day to pull the calipers off. How it got all the way from France to Texas that way, and how they even even managed to put it together that way remains a mystery...

    Dino 308gt4 forever!
  • What about us (me, anyway) who like to sing along? I'm a singer/songwriter, and I'll just tell ya, I belt out the tunes I hear. Whether they be tape, CD, radio, whatever. I like to sing, I enjoy it, and should a "Command Word" be in a song, how can it tell the difference? A word that is normally not used (Someone suggested "Computer" which isn't used a lot in songs...yet) would probably be best. He claims that normal conversation won't change it, but what about those of us who like to mimic? If some guy sings along to a song saying "Turn it up, Turn it up," what happens? I know one thing: I'm not going to pay $600 bucks to find out.

    -------------
    Obi

  • There are some pretty impressive MP3 hardware options coming out, so, I'm not sure if adding voice control would be worth the extra money (IMHO, no it wouldn't).

    One complaint I do have though is everything out is limited to Flash memory or a Hard drive in the device. Why can't I just have a CD player that plays MP3s like my apex? One I can take in the car, or walk around with?

    A nice strongARM, a cd player, headphone jack and car adapter/batteries.. Thats all I need. And this thermos.. Thats all I need. Maybe an nice display as an accesory.. thats all I need
  • And an hour later, when your file has trickled through that cell modem, you can listen to it!
  • I wouldn't buy it. I'd rather have a small computer hooked up to my car stereo (with a din connector or so).
  • you can also make mp3's of your own cd's and listen to them yourself right? well, i guess as long as you disregard the DMCA you can, and i do.
  • I've always thought voice control in general was a cool thing, but I've also always thought that it wasn't necessarily the best idea for controlling audio equipment. Why you ask? Does anyone remember the clapper? Has anyone seen a TV controlled by one of these things suddenly go off when a commercial for the clapper comes on the air? It hilarious, let me tell you, but it makes a point--the potential for interference is incredible. To handle it well, you would need a system to filter out the interference--you could, for instance, dynamically filter out (with decent success, even) your output from your input, ie take what you are currently playing and subtract it from your microphone input. Feasible, but you have to be careful with your implementation. Once the kinks are out, however, I'm in. :)
  • Aiwa has one coming out this summer also. You can read about it here: http://www.aiwa.com/Catalog00/Products2.asp?id=94

    And mp3.com lists some information about it here:
    http://hardware.mp3.com/hardware/individual/car/ 2738.html

    Yes, this is a CD-R/CD-RW model, and will not elimate the need to carry CD's, however you will need to carry far fewer. It is listed as retailing at US$350, which is really cheap.
  • It's in that banner, at the top of each page, the one I always ignore...

    Everyone has an idea for a cool new gadget. Why should you get free exposure on one of the most popular news sites on the net, when everyone else has to pay for it?

  • I think the empeg and this unit are both toast; Kenwood has a really slick cd/cdr mp3 player coming out in the summer. While I don't know the model number offhand, the local car audio place has it listed in their preorder catalog for this summer. It looks awesome, nice display, no voice (voice sucks, imho), and it plays cds, too. Check a kenwood dealer. Might be on their web site, too. The dealer had the info, though.

    The price point was, interestingly, about $1200cdn, or about $700usd. But, it's Kenwood - car audio is a hard market to break into because anyone that does circuit design knows that a car is a rough environment for a unit to be permanantly mounted in, and failure rates are high.

    I'll be shopping for a replacement for the CD player I have in my car now soon, and this definately looks like an attactive option. The prices being charged for these things are NUTS.

    Right now I just use a diamond rio (noise free!) and when I want new music, I charge it up off my vaio. This works well, because I'm rarely in the car long enough to repeat, and most of the time I either want techno or talk radio.. :)

    Kudos

  • $600?? Less! (Score:3)

    by technos ( 73414 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @08:50AM (#1106247) Homepage Journal
    I built one, without voice input capability, for less than $250 US. Sunnylab GXLite MediaGX POS board($40), ES1371 soundcard ($20, OEM), GL5446 videocard ($14), 8G Maxtor HD($79, on sale), 100W micro supply ($10 used) and a small inverter ($59). With a wee bit of modification, (a pair of L-shaped PCI adapters to lay the cards flat and a roll-your-own DC-DC supply) you could fit it into a case slightly smaller than the Kenwood changer it replaced. You can roll your own supply for $20 in parts, (a $50 savings) and toss the video card for a voice interface. Just add a uni mike to the FD ES1371 and your software. Buy in bulk and I'm willing to bet you could get the constituent parts for under $170, add a case for $20, and still make a decent profit at $279.99 final retail..
  • Gee -- if slashdot wants to become a forum for marketeer surveys and focus groups, maybe it should require that requesters pay the participants, just like in non-electronic forums. Most of these surveys pay $20, although a friend of mine participated in a "focus group" for Banana Republic for a $100 gift certificate. Market information like projected demand, prices, desired features, etc. is very valuable information, and I'm not going to give it away for free, nor should I expect Slashdot to provide a cost-free source of information for these people.

  • Re:I'll take two (Score:5)

    by TheKodiak ( 79167 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @08:34AM (#1106255) Homepage
    Safer? Yeah, until you get clever and teach it that it's name is "Pig", and set the stop playing command to "Die!". And then get pulled over by a motorcycle cop in a quiet neighborhood with your stereo blaring and start screaming over it to try to get it to shut up.

    Or maybe that's just me.

  • Re:Ok, but add this too (Score:3)

    by Pfhreakaz0id ( 82141 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @09:38AM (#1106258)
    . . . or you could just whack out a frontal lobe, and achieve the same effect!

    I'm out.
    ---

  • Ummm, What about paying IBM off? (Score:3)

    by jalbro ( 82805 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @08:06AM (#1106259)
    ViaVoice [ibm.com] is NOT free as in FREE beer. Heck, I don't think they would even qualify as Open Source. At least that's what you get by looking at their webpages.

    Why everybody using it in apps (Can you say GNOME?) when IBM hasn't clarified this?

    -Jeff

  • Conversation Changes Songs? (Score:5)

    by GeekLife.com ( 84577 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @07:39AM (#1106262) Homepage
    I'd hate to be expressing my love to a date and have "Nothing Compares 2 U" start up accidentally.

    How does the player differentiate between conversation and orders?
    -----
  • While you could probably make a way to connect something like this to Napster it would be rather useless. Connecting over the internet using a cell phone will give you a very slow speed. It would not be practical to try to download a lot of mp3s while connected by this means. Also I don't want to be crushing I-70 going 80 miles per hour and have some guy driving all over the road because he is searching napster for the latest Backstreet Boys song. Cell phones make the road dangerous enough we don't want to add danger by having peopel connect their phones to Napster.
  • If he's gonna make profit on this, he definetly needs to use some research firm and not non-random benevolent slashdot readers.

    Also, anyone else wondering how this thing is going to be powered? It's a minitower case. Display? Where do you put it? Runs on batteries?? There's too many details left out of the site and description to make it even a viable question "would you want one".

  • MP3 player for my car? Sign me up - the only reason I got a CD player for the car was that I couldn't get an MP3 player.
    (I wonder if those little cassette-adaptor things work for mp3 players, too?)
    Voice activated, on the other hand, I'd have to pass on. Other posters have brought up the point - what if I'm having a conversation with someone? What if I'm muttering to myself? What if I'm singing along to that wonderful hit, "Halt and Catch Fire"?
    Don't get me wrong, I like the concept of voice commands, there just needs to be a good way for the reciever to tell the difference between a command to it and regular speech. I'm reminded of the radio in one of the Hitchhiker's guide books - the one where you had to sit absolutely still while listening to it, otherwise you'd end up changing the station :)

  • I'll take two (Score:3)

    by xant ( 99438 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @07:59AM (#1106279) Homepage
    $600 sounds very reasonable. Heck, it's safer than a regular radio AND plays mp3s? If it delivers as promised it might be the first sound system that actually tempts me to get rid of my AM/FM.

  • Voice Technology (Score:5)

    by Life Blood ( 100124 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @07:42AM (#1106280) Homepage

    I realize that this is a verboten topic on slashdot - home of free software - but have you considered trying to sell/license your voice technology and design to any major manufacturers? You might be able to cut costs by having some electronics firm build what you design and then make your money through volume and licensing from them.

  • Cool, but (Score:4)

    by NuclearArchaeologist ( 104596 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @08:01AM (#1106283)
    no one is going to steal my $40 tape deck.

    "Computer, play that song...uhh that one that goes 'road runner' by that band..uhh I wish I knew the words.... Computer are you lis-" Sound of 1970 VW van wrapping around a light post.

    "Computer, call the doctor."

  • How'd you pull this off? I've been looking into this, and I can't figure out how to build it for less than a thousand... What did you do about the case? Where did you find that Mobo? What OS's does it support?

    I just bought the LCD w/ Keypad interface for mine, that will take a while to put together, your idea sounds like it would save me a few hundred bucks...

    Alex

    Alex
  • I think mp3 players and GPS would be neat.

    Driving on the expressway... heavy metal
    Driving in the ghetto... rap music
    Driving in the country... country music
    Pulling up in your Driveway... well, you get the point

  • dangerous (Score:3)

    by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @08:24AM (#1106291) Homepage Journal


    "Increase volume"


    "Increase volume"

    "Increase volume"

    "Increase volume"

    "Whoah. That's pretty damn loud...Decrease volume.?"

    "I said, 'DECREASE VOLUME.'"

    "Crap, this thing can't hear me!"

    "Decrease VOLUME!!!"

    Shuts car off.


    Seth
  • You would proabably start with a key command, like computer..play Nothing Compares 2 U. Gotta say, great idea but $600 is just too much to replace a perfectly good CD player.

    When car CD players first came out, they were more than $600! Let's be honest, this thing is going to take off!

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Your idea sounds cool, but you already knew it's cool when you posted your question here. A million /.ers are gonna tell you "Ya, I'd love to have one of these things!" The problem is that voice controlled UI increases complexity, and MP3 players are already relatively complicated appliances for the mass market. So, in order to really get some feedback, you pretty much need to do what the corporations do: market research. Or more specifically, targetted market research. You need to define your market and set sales goals in order to be able to gauge your success. As much as I appreciate the technical arts (I am an engineering student), and as much as I make fun of my MBA roomate, I must give credit to the business people that are able to collect technical talent, capital, and ideas and turn them into products we all use. It's not as easy as we might think....
    Good luck to you

  • Designing a UNIT (Score:3)

    by Kagato ( 116051 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @08:26AM (#1106302)
    The problem with the UK empeg is that it's produced in the UK. It's not quality or anything like that it's price. I've been there, I've purchased there, and even without VAT the costs are higher. The software isn't the problem. It's putting it all together. In the US you could have the parts come in from Singapore and Japan and have final build in Mexico, or some urban area (read The Hood). It would be 1/4 of the price as Empeg. Last year I had a question about the price of HD's, and Empeg said the prices couldn't be cheaper in the US because they bought directly from Fujistu in Japan. What they don't realize is the US market is way different than the EU. US Hard Drive market is domminated by Seagate, IBM, Maxtor, and Western Digital. US companies. Asian hard drive makers practically dump drives in the US just to make get product through the door.

    At any rate a large company like...Sony, Pioneer, Kenwood, etc. would be able to put together the hardware in bulk for a super cheap price.

    Me personally, I would look to team up with the people who are testing the StrongArm (LART) based computers that run linux (similar to Empeg) and license the "technology" both to large companies, but to general public as a hobby.

    In the spirit of OpenSource what I would like to see is someone take the work with LART, and perhaps create a module, or kit so to speak. A series of kits perhaps. The LART being a cheap PC, and a Car Kit that would connect to the LART and provide a user interface. I look at this as almost a computer. So why not make it modular so it can be upgraded.

    Just my $.02
  • Well I don't know about all of you, but when I'm in my car the stereo is pumpin tunes quite loudly ... which brings up my question ... how well would voice activated stereos be?

    Let's look at a hypothetical situation ... Someone passes you and you scream "Shove it" and just by coincidence you have the Deftones (My own summer shove it) in your playlist. Does this mean that unless you have quite a few songs named after choice phrases you won't be hearing much else.

    Also I really dis-like the "HaaavING too tawlk and bee punctwoal in ordehr two gewt theee thINGs to werk.

  • The obvious problem of conversation changing the song or the song lyrics changing the song can be solved.

    The problem is price. Years ago, cell phones, home computers, car navigation systems didn't have a market. When I wanted to buy my first computer in 1978 my aunt told me that "only rich people have computers at home, for toys."

    As more work is done, processing power increases at lower cost, the low price will generate a market.

  • I am fairly heavily into Hi-fi car eqpt, and spending $600 on a piece of hardware is not really all that much. Whether or not you can hit a market will depend on whether the hardware you use to build it will be high enough quality to be used in high end systems, because those are the kind of people who would spend that kind of money. I would definatly not skimp on the DSP that you use, it can make a big difference in the background noise. How would you tie it in with current stereos? FM modulation or RCA outputs would work, but digital optical outputs would cater more to the high end eqpt, which could easily raise the price into an unreasonable range.
  • If you are comfortable with running your own operation, you could have a contract manufacturer build the product and then sell them yourself. You'll retain more profit that way.

    To speak to the pricing question you pose, there is a marketing technique known as (I hope I get this right, it's been a few years since my college MKTG class...) "price skimming". Basically the idea is that, with any new technology, there is a small portion of the market that is willing to pay a very high price for the device. As the product matures, the price moves downward. This is because a) it becomes easier/cheaper to produce the product; b) more competition enters the market, driving the price downward; c) the manufacturer has recovered r&d costs and other minor factors.

    The risk is, of course, that the product introduction fails for any number of reasons, and you are never able to recover your r&d costs. In this case, though, it sounds like you've already done most of the r&d and you're willing to eat those costs... so you just need to cover the unit costs, which gives you quite a bit of pricing advantage.

  • Can't This Guy Do His Own Market Research (Score:4)

    by MasteroftheVoxel ( 162902 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @08:50AM (#1106355)
    Sounds like a cool idea, but I'm tired of these "Ask Slashdots" where we end up doing someones work for them.

    Can't he do his own market research? What does slashdot get back from this? It seems to me that the point of "Ask Slashdot" is so one may ask a question that others might also be interested in learning the answer to. Who cares whether people will buy a voice-activated mp3 player.

    I tired of have slashdot being used a guinea pig population of geeks that others can pitch their ideas at. Lets go back to the intellectually stimulating "Ask Slashdot".
  • A few things to think about.

    Control

    One big issue seems to be how the unit knows you're giving it a command. A "keyword" would work, though there is the issue of the music being too loud for the microphone to hear your voice. I would propose that rather than a audio cue for the system to listen to you, there be a physical one. A simple one button remote that would both tell the system you're giving it a command and instantly cut the output by 20db would likely work.

    Voice recognition/dictation

    About the effectiveness of the voice recognition. Like someone else mentioned, there is a huge difference between dictation and recognition as the words are used in the industry. (I once worked in a lab that was experimenting with voice controlled aircraft, hence my knowledge on the subject.)

    Any voice system works like this: listen to the sample, break it down into elements, and extrapolate a word from a given set from the sample.

    With dictation, the set of words is extremely large -- perhaps into the hundreds of thousands of words. With recognition, the set is much smaller -- maybe only a few hundred.

    If you've never used one, most voice systems will always "come up with" a word for what you said. Yes, they're essentially the same thing. The "dictionary" is just smaller with recognition. Therefore, the probability of it choosing the correct word is much higher.

    If you're going to use the voice system as recognition, i.e. replacing the functions of the buttons of an ordinary unit, it's considered recognition and fairly trivial, with probably at max 50 commands or "words".

    If you try to actually choose the song by name, you're essentially doing dictation. That would be difficult, though not as difficult as normal dictation, because the system can use logic such as the number of words in the song to choose between songs. I personally wouldn't want to tackle coding this.

    (This is, of course, ignoring the issue of how the computer thinks you should try to access the file 04_SMASHING_PUMPKINS_MELLONCHOLY_AND_INFINITE_SADN ESS_DISC_1_ZERO.MP3)

    Alternative Interface

    What if someone is speech impaired or doesn't like the voice interface? An alternative interface, perhaps in the form of a complicated remote control, is probably necessary, and is another issue (and cost) to think about.

    This product, properly implemented, has real potential. Design and propagation into the market are the roadblocks.

  • I'm a market strategist for a major semiconductor manufacturer that deals a lot with automotive applications. As such, I've seen what the bid autos have planned for their vehicles in the next few years. By 2005 every mid/upper-level car will ship with a computer built in complete with net access. Many of them will be in place by next year in fact. These devices will easily play mp3's along with CD's and some will even support DVD's, all with voice command. I don't see your product as being compelling enough to push people away from a factory installed device that does this and more. Sorry
  • Cops have better things to do than to see if you paid for the music you're playing. Considering recent developments, I'd be more concerned about Dr. Dre executing a drive-by on me.

  • Ok, but add this too (Score:5)

    by John Jorsett ( 171560 ) on Thursday April 27, 2000 @07:45AM (#1106373)
    Adding features to digital products is relatively easy, so in addition to the MP3 playback and voice capability, give the player a Tivo-like feature. I want to be able to listen to a radio station with the unit recording it in the background so that I can shut off the car, run an errand, then come back to listen starting where I left off. Not to mention rewind a bit to listen to something a second time. I like talk radio and it would be great not to have to miss things when I'm driving around. It would also be nice to be able to set the unit to record specific programs at specific station/times for later listening.
  • The URL above is a link to another solution for controlling an MP3 player with voice commands, called Voodoo Voice. This one is a Winamp plugin and uses Microsoft's SAPI and engine. I've used it in my (very noisy) car with a lot of success. The key is having a high quality uni-directional microphone. It requires very little (if any) training and supports "personalities", which are like voice skins. Although it seems to be working fairly well, it should be considered BETA.

    For those of you that doubt the viability of voice control because of your experiences with NaturallySpeaking or ViaVoice, read this: There is a _huge_ difference between dictation and command and control. Voodoo Voice, and almost certainly the original solution mentioned in the article, use command and control. I can almost guarantee you will be surprised at just how good command and control can be with no training at all.

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