Essential Install | HDANYWHERE
Alexa, MHUB + uControl =
All Your AV, Voice-Controlled
Dillan Pattni, head of design at HDANYWHERE (HDA), explains how
the company is making voice control a practical reality via MHUB
PRO’s integration with Amazon Alexa.
Dillan Pattni gave
us a detailed
interview on HDA’s
voice control plans
A huge part of our focus at EI Live! this
year was the imminent rollout of Alexa
voice control to all active MHUB PRO
units. The ability to use our voice to
simply and ea sily control all our TVs
and what we watch on them will help
our mission to make multiroom video
and audio more accessible.
However, we did not want to launch
until we had full confidence that we
could really deliver something useful
and not just a gimmick. At our X
Event in Manchester, we announced
that our new hardware would feature
functionality that no other brand
offered and that we would unveil new
ways to enable your matrix to do much
more within a home than ever before.
We introduced the world to our vision
for smarter, neater AV with the release
of MHUB PRO and at ISE this year we showed off our
work-in-progress Alexa skill; demonstrating switching
between sources and controlling source device content.
More Than Just Turn On
And Turn Off
Previewed at EI
Live!, HDA’s Alexa
Skills are due to
roll out in June
So you might ask, why have we not ‘turned on’ Alexa
voice control yet?
Well, I don’t think Alexa is ready for full home automation
just yet. We know that updates are coming to it but it’s
wise to make sure that installers know what can and can’t
be done with Amazon’s device. In my opinion, the Alexa
requires a number of additional tricks added to it in order to
serve a home properly. Things like voice recognition, Alexa
has no idea who is uttering a command:
mum, dad, kids or an unauthorised
stranger. Also neither Echo or Dot can
tell what device I am addressing from
proximity or volume. If I shout ‘Alexa’
and there is a Dot in one room and
another in the room adjacent, they will
both wake and await response. The only
way around this is to create dedicated
‘wake words’ for each room, but that’s
unnatural in my opinion. Zone context
is also important and lacking; there is
currently no way to manage where in
your home your Alexa device is situated,
meaning you have to announce the
room you’re in to control devices in that
room. Lastly there is limited support for
smart home functions in the API which
has meant that HDA has had to write
custom skills to get the best results.
Alexa, Turn On My TV
We wanted to do better than Amazon’s limited and
unnatural smart home skills and have been working to
make voice commands short, memorable and intelligent.
If your Alexa and TV is in the lounge, for example, then
it seems odd that you have to declare the room you’re in -
our implementation doesn’t. We have not jumped on the
band wagon and instead have carefully developed our
voice commands to try and make something that people
might actually use vs a series of unnatural commands that
might be used because it is novel and then ditched.
Our design mantra was, if you could execute the
command faster by picking up a remote or using our
uControl App, then we should not do it.
So What Can We Do With Alexa?
With our implementation it’s possible to turn on any/all your
TVs, set any source and control it with a simple ‘on’ command.
Going further, you can pause/play, change channel/
volume, execute macros (we call them sequences) to do
complex commands with a single voice command.
It’s so exciting to see it work in real time and installers got
their first chance at EI Live!. We were able to show live
editing via our Pro Remote Management Portal on our
HDA Cloud Service, pushing that update to our demo
MHUBs; pretty impressive stuff. We are expecting all the
skills to start rolling out in the first week of June; get in
touch if you want to learn more.
More information: HDA +44(0)1684 576 348,
www.hdanywhere.co.uk, twitter @hdanywhere,
www.facebook.com/hdanywhere
May 2017 | 51