Experiences with voice-controlled ubiquitously networked home entertainment systems

Home entertainment components usually come with remote controls as user interfaces. When combining components from different vendors, customers end up with a zoo of remote controls at their coffee tables. Most conventional approaches aiming to solve this problem, use some kind of graphical user interface allowing the user to browse through the various functions of each device. Meanwhile, research in speech technology has reached a state where it becomes suitable for the mass market. In this paper, we present a test bed as well as the results of several tests, which we have conducted to elucidate the idea of speech control for spontaneously networked home entertainment systems. Short conclusion: ubiquitous computing and speech control complement each other very sufficiently