7 ms·

My Voice Controlled Smart Mirror: A Postmortem

147 points by Uehreka 10y ago

nattaylor 10y ago
I love the "cool" factor of this; it just looks cool. Chris's addition of voice controls is equally cool. The appeal to average people is cool; the hacking together of so many tools is cool. I'm curious where stuff like this heads...
- netsharc 10y ago
  At first sight, yes, but do we really need to be able to read Hacker News on (voice) command? Or even the weather for that matter. To me it feels like a "We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters" kind of future.
  - melling 10y ago
    Yeah, I know what you mean. I like to rip people who actually build real stuff from behind the glow of my computer. Why can't they simply build Jarvis and be done with it? I could do that if I wanted to. Do I need to explain sarcasm? Probably. Anyway, the challenge is to do better, not to criticize.
    - NickBusey 10y ago
      So unless we feel motivated to construct a 'better' smart mirror, we're not able to point out that we think the very idea is silly? I mean, I appreciate the effort, and it's really a cool build, but rather pointless in the end. Is that not a valid point of discussion?
      - melling 10y ago
        Don't limit your imagination to a mirror. The OP wanted to build and learn. Might be kid's stuff or pointless to you. He shipped his version 1.0. That's more than most.
  - Uehreka 10y ago
    In building new intents and views for the mirror, it's kind of trial and error as to what will be actually useful and what won't. The weather intent has been genuinely useful. I can wake up in the morning, say "Alexa, ask XANA about the weather", and get back a chart that shows the exact info I want. I use this pretty organically (I don't just force myself to use it) every day, and I've found myself using my weather app less. I just find it to be a lower friction interface. The Hacker News intents were a cool proof of concept, and I was hoping they would help me waste less time on HN by getting a summary of the important stuff without access to the full site. While I still like it and use it from time to time, it isn't as viscerally useful as the weather intent.
adrianN 10y ago
Is there any free-software voice recognition that one could use in case one doesn't trust the Amazon Echo not to send everything you say to the NSA?
- rglullis 10y ago
  Yeap: https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://jasperproject.github.io/
- Taylor_OD 10y ago
  I didnt want to get a echo because of this. One of my friends pointed out that I have no issue carrying around a cell phone with a mic and camera that can and likely is used for exactly this. Now I have an echo and I can turn on nature sounds at night without having to get up and go to my computer.
  - vollmond 10y ago
    Yeah. I'm pretty paranoid, but I already have Google Now, Siri, and Cortana in my house via phones and laptops, so bringing in Alexa really isn't much of a stretch.
    - stormbrew 10y ago
      If you're really paranoid but need to have at least one of these things, you could make a reasonable argument that using as many of them as possible will increase the size of conspiracy necessary for certain types of attacks against you (eg. wrongful conviction).
- reubenmorais 10y ago
  Mozilla is working on an open source speech-to-text engine, which might be interesting for you: https://connected.mozilla.org/2016/11/28/the-next-phase-for-project-vaani/ https://connected.mozilla.org/2016/11/28/the-next-phase-for-...
- emsy 10y ago
  You can install Alexa on a raspberry pi and make it so the mic only turns on when a button is pressed.
SEJeff 10y ago
A bit surprised no one mentioned the (quite large) open source project one of the first Magic Mirror developers created and it is really good: https://magicmirror.builders/ https://magicmirror.builders/
- Uehreka 10y ago
  After I built this, I discovered a bunch of these things. I hadn't seen that one, it looks really neat! One of the benefits of my approach (for me) was that I already had an Echo and a Kindle Fire (that I wasn't using). If you have a bunch of tech lying around, this approach can be more cost effective than buying a big screen.
  - SEJeff 10y ago
    Oh totally not knocking your project, this was a fantastic writeup! Thanks for doing it! I was just a bit surprised that no one else in this thread mentioned that one as it has been around for awhile and is relatively well established in "home automation" circles that I tend to frequent.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
boxcardavin 10y ago
I'm always fascinated by people's fascination with smart mirrors. I don't get it myself, but I like their enthusiasm.
- Uehreka 10y ago
  For me, the mirror aspect is a neat addition, but really I just like having an always-on screen that displays data at my slightest whim. It's a lower friction way of getting weather data than pulling out my phone and opening an app. Other things I've thought about implementing or partially implemented: - A CPU or memory graph for my servers (or real time Google Analytics data). - A graph of my WiFi's connection speed so I can tell when Comcast is dropping the ball. - A graph of the travel time with traffic for my commute so I can make decisions about when to leave for work.
  - ineptech 10y ago
    Just for another perspective, I intentionally left voice commands off of my mirror because the last thing I wanted was another thing to interact with, mere feet away from my laptop, phone, tablet, etc. Instead, I treat mine exactly like a clock. Had it up more than a year, still love it, but beyond glancing at it to see how the weather is or when my train comes, I never interact with it or give it a second thought.
- NickBusey 10y ago
  Yea I spend, on average, maybe 5 seconds tops looking at myself in the mirror every day. Why would you build so much functionality into a display that only exists in one, usually very humid sometimes smelly room, and the only way to interact with it is to stand there shouting into the steamy air?
  - dr_zoidberg 10y ago
    Well I'd say it's meant for a bedroom or living room mirror, not the bathroom mirror. Now in my house there's only two mirrors, one inside the wardrobe and the other in the bathroom, so I wouldn't get much of a Smart Mirror TM, but a few friends do have living room mirrors, so for them it could have a better use case than mine.
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
I'm not a web dev, just "know enough to be dangerous", so I have to ask: the functionality that we see is just browsing HN, but he mentions using the API to fetch data and that this is cumbersome. Why not just do simple wget calls (or equivalent)?
- nkozyra 10y ago
  It doesn't look like it's just browsing HN, I think that's a custom view via the API.
- Uehreka 10y ago
  So that approach would be called "web scraping", and was the only way to build HN-based apps and sites before they gave us an API. Many apps still do this. The API is a little cumbersome (it's totally RESTful, which means you sometimes have to make tons of HTTP requests to get enough data for a particular view), but it's much more reliable. I don't have to worry that HN might change the structure of their markup and break my app. (Bear in mind, that's not HN's markup on the page, it's new markup that I wrote using the data from HN's API.)
bakhy 10y ago
i understand i'm nitpicking, but maybe someone should tell the author what "mortem" means? i was expecting something dead, a failure story. pick another worn out phrase ;)
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  In some corners of our industry, postmortem is a standard term for analysis of a project after it has been shipped and work on it has been finished. EDIT: s/In our industry/In some corners of our industry/
  - mmanfrin 10y ago
    That's a retrospective -- a post mortem usually refers to talking about an incident where something went catastrophically wrong.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      I think Agile has already hijacked the word "retrospective" to mean something else - a meeting, not a publication. For better or worse, that's how the word "postmortem" is used in some corners of programming world. I've become familiar with it in gamedev circles, something like 10 to 15 years ago.
      - SolaceQuantum 10y ago
        I'm surprised at this length of thread within a tech context. I believe a similar thread occurred, but with context of scriptwriting, just a day or three ago. That conversation was all about how scriptwriting isn't reasonable or sensible enough and how things should be changed...
    - pluma 10y ago
      It seems to be a standard term in game development at least: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/ http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/ You're right that in our corner of the industry it typically refers to particular incidents, though. It seems pointless to argue which one is more correct, though. For the record, here's Wikipedia's take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_documentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_documentation Key quote: > A project post-mortem is a process, usually performed at the conclusion of a project, to determine and analyze elements of the project that were successful or unsuccessful. (emphasis added)
dweinus 10y ago
Is the screen always on, or does it wake up on command? If so, how? If not, does it produce visible light in the room when not displaying? Amazing result, well done & thank you for sharing!
- Uehreka 10y ago
  It's always on. This means that when the lights are out, there's a faint black rectangle (with the time in the upper right corner) shining on my wall. It was a little annoying at first, but now I don't notice it. It doesn't keep me from falling asleep. I couldn't find an API in Fire OS to change the user's screen brightness, and I don't know that one exists. I'd love to have it be brighter during the day to compete better with sunlight, but alas.
  - ineptech 10y ago
    Never used FireOS, but I assume you'd just use the Android windowsmanager. Code (from my smart mirror, which I posted here a year ago and no one cared) here, line 190: https://github.com/ineptech/mirror/blob/master/src/com/ineptech/magicmirror/BrightnessController.java https://github.com/ineptech/mirror/blob/master/src/com/inept...
vvanders 10y ago
Nice! When I posted my comment yesterday I wasn't expecting to see it on a mirror!

147 points by Uehreka 10y ago

I love the "cool" factor of this; it just looks cool. Chris's addition of voice controls is equally cool. The appeal to average people is cool; the hacking together of so many tools is cool. I'm curious where stuff like this heads...

netsharc 10y ago
At first sight, yes, but do we really need to be able to read Hacker News on (voice) command? Or even the weather for that matter. To me it feels like a "We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters" kind of future.
- melling 10y ago
  Yeah, I know what you mean. I like to rip people who actually build real stuff from behind the glow of my computer. Why can't they simply build Jarvis and be done with it? I could do that if I wanted to. Do I need to explain sarcasm? Probably. Anyway, the challenge is to do better, not to criticize.
  - NickBusey 10y ago
    So unless we feel motivated to construct a 'better' smart mirror, we're not able to point out that we think the very idea is silly? I mean, I appreciate the effort, and it's really a cool build, but rather pointless in the end. Is that not a valid point of discussion?
    - melling 10y ago
      Don't limit your imagination to a mirror. The OP wanted to build and learn. Might be kid's stuff or pointless to you. He shipped his version 1.0. That's more than most.
- Uehreka 10y ago
  In building new intents and views for the mirror, it's kind of trial and error as to what will be actually useful and what won't. The weather intent has been genuinely useful. I can wake up in the morning, say "Alexa, ask XANA about the weather", and get back a chart that shows the exact info I want. I use this pretty organically (I don't just force myself to use it) every day, and I've found myself using my weather app less. I just find it to be a lower friction interface. The Hacker News intents were a cool proof of concept, and I was hoping they would help me waste less time on HN by getting a summary of the important stuff without access to the full site. While I still like it and use it from time to time, it isn't as viscerally useful as the weather intent.

adrianN 10y ago

Is there any free-software voice recognition that one could use in case one doesn't trust the Amazon Echo not to send everything you say to the NSA?

rglullis 10y ago
Yeap: https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://jasperproject.github.io/
Taylor_OD 10y ago
I didnt want to get a echo because of this. One of my friends pointed out that I have no issue carrying around a cell phone with a mic and camera that can and likely is used for exactly this. Now I have an echo and I can turn on nature sounds at night without having to get up and go to my computer.
- vollmond 10y ago
  Yeah. I'm pretty paranoid, but I already have Google Now, Siri, and Cortana in my house via phones and laptops, so bringing in Alexa really isn't much of a stretch.
  - stormbrew 10y ago
    If you're really paranoid but need to have at least one of these things, you could make a reasonable argument that using as many of them as possible will increase the size of conspiracy necessary for certain types of attacks against you (eg. wrongful conviction).
reubenmorais 10y ago
Mozilla is working on an open source speech-to-text engine, which might be interesting for you: https://connected.mozilla.org/2016/11/28/the-next-phase-for-project-vaani/ https://connected.mozilla.org/2016/11/28/the-next-phase-for-...
emsy 10y ago
You can install Alexa on a raspberry pi and make it so the mic only turns on when a button is pressed.

SEJeff 10y ago

A bit surprised no one mentioned the (quite large) open source project one of the first Magic Mirror developers created and it is really good: https://magicmirror.builders/ https://magicmirror.builders/

Uehreka 10y ago
After I built this, I discovered a bunch of these things. I hadn't seen that one, it looks really neat! One of the benefits of my approach (for me) was that I already had an Echo and a Kindle Fire (that I wasn't using). If you have a bunch of tech lying around, this approach can be more cost effective than buying a big screen.
- SEJeff 10y ago
  Oh totally not knocking your project, this was a fantastic writeup! Thanks for doing it! I was just a bit surprised that no one else in this thread mentioned that one as it has been around for awhile and is relatively well established in "home automation" circles that I tend to frequent.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

boxcardavin 10y ago

I'm always fascinated by people's fascination with smart mirrors. I don't get it myself, but I like their enthusiasm.

Uehreka 10y ago
For me, the mirror aspect is a neat addition, but really I just like having an always-on screen that displays data at my slightest whim. It's a lower friction way of getting weather data than pulling out my phone and opening an app. Other things I've thought about implementing or partially implemented: - A CPU or memory graph for my servers (or real time Google Analytics data). - A graph of my WiFi's connection speed so I can tell when Comcast is dropping the ball. - A graph of the travel time with traffic for my commute so I can make decisions about when to leave for work.
- ineptech 10y ago
  Just for another perspective, I intentionally left voice commands off of my mirror because the last thing I wanted was another thing to interact with, mere feet away from my laptop, phone, tablet, etc. Instead, I treat mine exactly like a clock. Had it up more than a year, still love it, but beyond glancing at it to see how the weather is or when my train comes, I never interact with it or give it a second thought.
NickBusey 10y ago
Yea I spend, on average, maybe 5 seconds tops looking at myself in the mirror every day. Why would you build so much functionality into a display that only exists in one, usually very humid sometimes smelly room, and the only way to interact with it is to stand there shouting into the steamy air?
- dr_zoidberg 10y ago
  Well I'd say it's meant for a bedroom or living room mirror, not the bathroom mirror. Now in my house there's only two mirrors, one inside the wardrobe and the other in the bathroom, so I wouldn't get much of a Smart Mirror TM, but a few friends do have living room mirrors, so for them it could have a better use case than mine.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

I'm not a web dev, just "know enough to be dangerous", so I have to ask: the functionality that we see is just browsing HN, but he mentions using the API to fetch data and that this is cumbersome. Why not just do simple wget calls (or equivalent)?

nkozyra 10y ago
It doesn't look like it's just browsing HN, I think that's a custom view via the API.
Uehreka 10y ago
So that approach would be called "web scraping", and was the only way to build HN-based apps and sites before they gave us an API. Many apps still do this. The API is a little cumbersome (it's totally RESTful, which means you sometimes have to make tons of HTTP requests to get enough data for a particular view), but it's much more reliable. I don't have to worry that HN might change the structure of their markup and break my app. (Bear in mind, that's not HN's markup on the page, it's new markup that I wrote using the data from HN's API.)

bakhy 10y ago

i understand i'm nitpicking, but maybe someone should tell the author what "mortem" means? i was expecting something dead, a failure story. pick another worn out phrase ;)

TeMPOraL 10y ago
In some corners of our industry, postmortem is a standard term for analysis of a project after it has been shipped and work on it has been finished. EDIT: s/In our industry/In some corners of our industry/
- mmanfrin 10y ago
  That's a retrospective -- a post mortem usually refers to talking about an incident where something went catastrophically wrong.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I think Agile has already hijacked the word "retrospective" to mean something else - a meeting, not a publication. For better or worse, that's how the word "postmortem" is used in some corners of programming world. I've become familiar with it in gamedev circles, something like 10 to 15 years ago.
    - SolaceQuantum 10y ago
      I'm surprised at this length of thread within a tech context. I believe a similar thread occurred, but with context of scriptwriting, just a day or three ago. That conversation was all about how scriptwriting isn't reasonable or sensible enough and how things should be changed...
  - pluma 10y ago
    It seems to be a standard term in game development at least: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/ http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/ You're right that in our corner of the industry it typically refers to particular incidents, though. It seems pointless to argue which one is more correct, though. For the record, here's Wikipedia's take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_documentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_documentation Key quote: > A project post-mortem is a process, usually performed at the conclusion of a project, to determine and analyze elements of the project that were successful or unsuccessful. (emphasis added)

dweinus 10y ago

Is the screen always on, or does it wake up on command? If so, how? If not, does it produce visible light in the room when not displaying? Amazing result, well done & thank you for sharing!

Uehreka 10y ago
It's always on. This means that when the lights are out, there's a faint black rectangle (with the time in the upper right corner) shining on my wall. It was a little annoying at first, but now I don't notice it. It doesn't keep me from falling asleep. I couldn't find an API in Fire OS to change the user's screen brightness, and I don't know that one exists. I'd love to have it be brighter during the day to compete better with sunlight, but alas.
- ineptech 10y ago
  Never used FireOS, but I assume you'd just use the Android windowsmanager. Code (from my smart mirror, which I posted here a year ago and no one cared) here, line 190: https://github.com/ineptech/mirror/blob/master/src/com/ineptech/magicmirror/BrightnessController.java https://github.com/ineptech/mirror/blob/master/src/com/inept...

vvanders 10y ago

Nice! When I posted my comment yesterday I wasn't expecting to see it on a mirror!