I have a couple of very disabled people I currently have setup with Rasplex. Considering getting them up HTPCs if I can get voice control to work with OpenPHT. Anyone attempted this before?
Take a look here: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/173499/amazon-echo-and-plex-alexa-tell-the-home-theater-to-put-on-a-good-episode-of-always-sunny/p1
Oh nice. That looks like exactly what I’m looking for. Thanks. 
If you have an android device you might wanna try my app, Voice Control for Plex.
@atomjack said:
If you have an android device you might wanna try my app, Voice Control for Plex.
Interesting stuff. I don’t have any android devices. Does it run well on an android Minix box? Hate to change over to a more limited client interface, but I doubt there’s development for voice control on Rasplex anytime soon. And I imagine a simple interface works better with voice control anyway. 
@benjaminwolf said:
Interesting stuff. I don’t have any android devices. Does it run well on an android Minix box? Hate to change over to a more limited client interface, but I doubt there’s development for voice control on Rasplex anytime soon. And I imagine a simple interface works better with voice control anyway.
I really don’t know, as I don’t have one. If you get ahold of one and try my app out and run into problems, email me (my username at gmail) and I’ll do whatever I can to help you get it working.
@benjaminwolf:
The media player itself does not need any voice control ability. It only needs to have the Plex API to receive cast media and remote control commands over network, and RasPlex does have that (like any modern PHT implementation). So any Android unit capable of running the voice control app should be able to control RasPlex this way. However, in order to work for a person with disabilities preventing use of normal remotes (and thus a normal android touchscreen too), it would be necessary to configure the Android phone or tablet for voice control of EVERYTHING, which is no small task.
@atomjack:
I’ve tested your app a little, and I have one serious error to report:
Manual login is not working (at least not on my “HTC One X” phone.
After entering my username and password as prompted I touched the OK button, to no effect.
Nothing whatever happened when touching that button, which I tried repeatedly.
In the end I had to switch to the PIN method (that button worked fine), and use a web browser to complete the process. (Something I hate having to do, which is why I always use manual login in all clients that permit it.)
Another thing that should be improved is the list of languages shown when choosing voice for feedback or error messages, as the current list seems to be completely randomly ordered, making it awkward to find the right entry to use (especially on a small phone). That list really ought to be sorted alphabetically.
After logging in I was able to use the app, finding that it clearly has some limitations.
Some of these are inherent to ALL voice control attempts though, so I don’t blame the app for those…
For one case with several movies having titles starting with the spoken title (common with sequels) the app didn’t let me choose which one to use, but simply asked me to be more specific. That wouldn’t work though, as I had already used the real title. For other cases the official movie title may contain characters that are not pronounced, but which the app still considers significant. One common case in my collection is that movies may exist in more than one version, such as “Frozen (720p)”, “Frozen (1080p)”, “Frozen (1080p 3D)”, and here I’m not at all sure how to speak such titles. (should parentheses be audible somehow ?)
One way to solve the issue of duplicates could be to have the app ask if the user wants it to read back the names of the alternate movies found, and if the user replies “Yes” the app can read each title back but adding a number before each such title and asking the user to say the number of the one to watch, or “None” to cancel the choice. It would be a bit cumbersome, but more useful than just asking the user to “be more specific” (which the user might not be able to do, not knowing the precise media list by heart).
Oh, and just to avoid silly scenarios, the app could limit its list of duplicates to 9 entries or less.
Even so, it would clearly work better if my media collection had less duplicates, and used names restricted to pronounceable words without ‘special’ characters tripping up the voice recognition.
When attempting to use voice control during playback I had serious problems getting the wanted effects.
But this sort of problem may be inevitable when the spoken commands are mixed in with both background noise and the audio track of the playing movie.
Best regards: dlanor
@dlanor Thanks for all your feedback.
I fixed the manual login issue. There must have been a change in a recent PMS version that caused the http response code to change (from 200 to 201), so my app was thinking the login wasn’t working. The latest version in the play store has the fix. I’ve also added support for Audio and Subtitle streams (through both the now playing screen and by using voice commands).
The next version I push will have the language list sorted alphabetically, when you select voice feedback (or errors). Thanks for pointing that out.
I’ll see if I can work in some more intelligent handling of duplicates, like you’ve suggested. It might take awhile, though. That said, there is also an issue of finding things when the title has punctuation in it, since the PMS API doesn’t have an option to do a fuzzy search. For instance, the show title for “Star Trek: The Next Generation” has the colon as part of “Trek”, so when you speak “Star Trek The Next Generation”, it’s searching for that whole string, which doesn’t include the colon, and the PMS API doesn’t return the show as a match. The only way I see around this is to not use the PMS API’s search function but to instead just get every single show (or movie, or whatever) and match that way, but I’m not sure if that’s the route I wanna take.
If you have any more feedback or thoughts on these matters, feel free to visit my XDA thread or email me (atomjack at gmail).
