Amulet Devices have been in touch to let us know that they have released a new Amulet beta release – version 3.00.01. Included in this release is full My Movies 4 support.
The Amulet Remote is the controller Windows Media Center owners have been waiting for. Access all your media instantly using simple voice commands and gestures. No more complex key sequences to remember.
- Select media by name (Channels, Artists, Songs, Movies, TV shows, photos)
- Multiple speaker profiles, selectable by voice (“This is Pete”)
- Audio responses to questions (“This is ‘Videotape’ by Radiohead from the album ‘In Rainbows’)
- Navigate TV guide by voice (“Record ABC Next Tuesday at 7 PM”)
- Flexible operation – use voice or buttons for most operations
- Instant access to video timeline (‘Skip to 1 hour and 10 minutes”, “Skip over ads”)
- Infra-red learning – teach Amulet to control any of your other audio visual equipment
How it Works?
- You pick up the remote and speak a command such as “Play Artist Rolling Stones”.
- The built-in microphone transmits your voice to the Amulet software in your Windows Media Center.
- The Amulet remote includes advanced position sensing technology, which means that Amulet only listens when you talk to it, not when you’re chatting with friends or family. Amulet understands your commands and ignores your conversations
Here is what Amulet have said:
I’m pleased to announce that the new beta release of Amulet’s Media Center software is now available for download. As we are growing close to a final production release, we have changed the version number to v3 to reflect this.
You can download the software and release notes here:
- Download Release Notes
- Download 32-bit release
- Download 64-bit release
As always, please let us know how you get on by posting feedback here in the forum. In particular, we are keen to get as much feedback as possible on the new My Movies support. I have created a separate My Movies thread for discussion of this.
Now, here is a summary of changes since the previous releases, Beta 2.18.14, Beta 2.18.16 and Beta 2.18.17:
MY MOVIES 4.0 SUPPORT
Full My Movies 4 support is now included, allowing any movie or TV series / episode indexed by My Movies to be selected by voice, and voice control of the My Movies GUI. Full details are in the My Movies section of the Release Notes, but here are a few sample commands to give you a flavour:
- GO TO MOVIES
- GO TO TV SERIES
- SHOW TV SERIES THE SHIELD
- SHOW SEASON 5
- WATCH EPISODE NUMBER 4
- WATCH EPISODE OF MICE AND LEM
- SHOW EPISODE 3
- SHOW COMEDY MOVIES
- SHOW SORT OPTIONS
- SORT BY STAR RATING
- SORT BY PRODUCTION YEAR
- SHOW VIEW OPTIONS
- VIEW COVERS AND DETAILS
- LIST NOT WATCHED
- LIST COMEDY
GENERAL ENHANCEMENTS
- SEARCH YOUTUBE AGAIN command now repeats the most recent YouTube search
- The debug log now records mic on/off events, and measures how long the mic was on for when a particular command was recognized, for diagnostic purposes
- PLAY ARTIST and PLAY GENRE now immediately respond with the name of what is being played; previously, it waited until the playlist was fully built which could take several seconds
- SOUND OFF / QUIET and similar commands now speak a response message before muting the sound, to make it easier to detect accidental invocations when no music is playing
- Added MINIMIZE MEDIA CENTER, to complement existing MAXIMIZE MEDIA CENTER command
- Amulet Talker now supports the command line option FILE filename to read the contents of a disk file out loud (useful for custom commands & scripts)
BUG FIXES
- YouTube interface is now working again. The current implementation should be robust enough to deal with any likely YouTube player updates or enhancements.
- Find Songs option in Amulet Settings, introduced in 2.17, now sets the correct option in Amulet.ini so should work correctly. Remember to say UPDATE MUSIC after turning on this setting or your song index won’t exist. When enabled, the feature allows you to say FIND SONG name and create a playlist containing songs matching name.
- EPG background scan no longer runs constantly on systems where all current guide data has expired.
- PLAY GENRE now only recognizes musical genres, not video/TV genres
- RUN and RUNBACK actions in Custom Commands now work correctly when the command line to execute contains an ‘=’ symbol
- Improved code to detect when YouTube plug-in currently has focus
- Amulet.Scanner now correctly detects metadata from currently recording TV programs during its nightly scan of all programs (previously only worked when invoked automatically as the program began)
