Skype as a whole-house Wireless Microphone for Home Automation

After buying a home (finally!) this past fall, I've been setting up a bunch of home automation capabilities. Recently I got far enough along that I started pondering how I might get a whole-house microphone system talking to my central (Windows XP-based) computer running HomeSeer (v2.0.4.36). I first considered xTag USB-Only System w/ One xTag Wearable Microphone, but the range of just tens of feet seemed way too limiting.

Then I had a thought... a wonderful, crazy thought... what if I could find a WiFi microphone -- one that used my existing 802.11n wireless network. After doing some quick searches, I realized that I already had such a thing: my Apple iPod touch (2nd generation since it needs a microphone on the hardware) and Skype! All I needed to do was use my iPod touch (or iPhone, or anything that has a decent Skype client) to call a Skype account running on my home automation server. I could then configure the sound output from that call to be the voice recognition input into HomeSeer's "Speaker" application that then controls HomeSeer. (Notably, the Speaker application actually need not be running on the same machine as HomeSeer, but I'm trying to be green by having only a single low-wattage computer always-on in my house, so I run it on the same machine.)

Now, if you've not been reading all my oh-so-infrequent posts, you may be thinking "hmmm, that sounds great, but how do you make the audio output from one program [Skype] become the microphone input of another program [Speaker]?"

Avid readers realize that in an earlier post I
did exactly that to Stream iTunes music to my SqueezeBox duet receiver. Using Virtual Audio Cable 4, I created two virtual audio cables -- I set up "Virtual Cable 1" as the default output channel for Speaker as shown in the first figure.



Then I set up "Virtual Cable 2" as the default microphone input -- you do that from the Control Panel -> Sound page. (It varies by Windows operating system variant.) After making those changes, you need to restart the Speaker client and at that point the Virtual Audio Cable's control panel will look like the below -- notice that there is 1 recording stream on Virtual Cable 2 -- that's the Speaker application that opened that cable as its microphone. If it's not showing 1 there, you need to try again to make that cable the default input and restart the Speaker application.


After that, I set up Skype on the home automation PC, created a distinct user account, set it up to only accept calls from my specific other Skype account, and made it auto-answer calls. I set the audio settings of Skype to have the microphone input be Virtual Cable 1 (the one that the Speaker application is doing text-to-speech on, since that input will be sent over to the speaker of my iPod touch so I can hear what the computer says to me) and to have the Skype speaker output setting be Virtual Cable 2 (the one that the Speaker application is using for voice recognition, since it's gonna play out what it hears from what I say into my microphone on my iPod Touch). The audio settings end up looking like this:


To test it, I made a call from my iPod Touch to that new Skype account. The Virtual Audio Cable control panel comes in handy here again, as it should, after the call is connected, look like:


Notice that now there is a recording stream on Virtual Cable 1 (Skype reading its microphone input, the output of the Speaker application) and a playback stream on Virtual Cable 2 (Skype writing its speaker out to the input of the Speaker application).

From that point, I'm able to give voice commands to HomeSeer via my iPod Touch. I had to retrain the voice recognizer (Windows Control Panel->Speech) for this new setup, even just to get Speaker to recognize the attention phrase. It'd be nice to not require the attention phrase and to simply take a command immediately upon Skype answering a call, but I'm not an expert with Speaker so I'm not sure it's possible.

I was also able to get this working using my new HTC Droid Incredible Android Phone, and again had to retrain voice recognition and microphone levels with that set up. Unfortunately (and surprisingly) Verizon seems to only let its Skype Mobile run over 3G and not over WiFi... this seems really insane especially for the substantially more open Android platform -- remember, Skype exists in a more full-featured form for the Apple-controlled iPhone. Regardless, I got VoIP over WiFi working using Fring and its Skype plug-in.

All in all, I'm pretty psyched to now have my whole-house microphone setup! Now if only HSTouch on the iPod Touch worked with the SqueezeBox plug-in without crashing... then I might be able to control my audio using my voice (I still use the awesome iPeng application to do that, and waiting for an Apple iPad Tablet version of that app).