VoicePics - A Toy App that encourages toddlers to Babble

[jaden]

Any feedback from beta users?

Also: I'd love help making some additional image packs appropriate for kids.

-mouser (May 15, 2011, 07:29 PM)

I just tried it out with my 2 year-old son but he was too shy to say anything into the mic.  My 6 year-old was more than happy to test it in his place but there weren't any pictures of farts 

If it's possible, it would be helpful to enable voice recognition when VoicePics starts.  It was started but disabled so I had to click on it to start, but I couldn't see the mouse cursor.  If you can't enable it, maybe you could let users know the shortcut to enable it.

When the word was recognized, VoicePics showed 2 to 4 images but they were often the same, even on words that have a decent selection of images like birds or houses.  Some images were hard to recognize for the 2yo when they were stretched across the screen (23" monitor), but it was still cool.  Even though the 2yo refused to say any words he was excited to see the things I said when they popped up.  And he kept asking where the thing was when it wasn't recognized.

Me: watermelon
VoicePics: birds
2yo: Where is watermelon?
Me: grapes
VoicePics: house
2yo: Where is grapes?
Me: @#$%
VoicePics: duck
2yo: What was that word Dada?

[mouser]

ha!

Thank you very much for the report!
I'm not sure why voice recognition wasn't enabled by default.  What operating system are you using? Maybe it's a feature I don't have on my windows xp x64.

I wonder if i shouldnt set it by default to only show 1 image full screen per monitor -- or at least change the options so that it doesn't result in those very stretched images occasionally.  Avoiding duplicates would be good too.

[jaden]

You're welcome   This was on Windows 7 x64, and it may well be a "feature" of Windows 7 voice recognition.  I'll report back if I find anything else (if I can get the 2yo to be less afraid of the mic).

[mouser]

you can go into options and turn off response to normal keys, and then the 2yr can hit keys on keyboard instead of talking.

[cthorpe]

My 15 month old son definitely enjoys babbling at the computer and seeing what pops up.  Oddly enough, "frog" constantly shows up, even when his babbling doesn't sound like frog to me.  I put in pictures of him, my wife, and myself, and he definitely gets excited when I make them appear, but so far he hasn't figured out that making sounds like me will get those pics to pop up.

C

[mouser]

I actually worried that under a certain age it might be quite hard for them to get a variety of pictures to show up because their proto-words would all sounds quite narrow in range to the speech recognition engine.. but then i figured well maybe it would serve as motivation to get them to vary their vocalizations..

[mouser]

I have now posted the first official release of the newly named LittleVoiceCommander.
New forum area here: https://www.donation...ndex.php?board=303.0

This old thread is now locked -- please discuss in the new forum area.