Visit to The Maples
In February 2022, the Karten project team visited The Maples bungalow at Portland College near Mansfield to setup and test Voiceitt commands to control their fantastic new Smart Home equipment, recently installed with funding from the Ian Karten Charitable Trust. We were able to use Voiceitt to control lights and blinds in every room, to set the heating and view cameras at the front and back doors, and even to show what’s in the fridge! The Portland team have setup routines in Alexa to carry out several actions with a single command. For example, ‘Good morning’ will open the blinds and turn on the lights throughout the bungalow, while ‘Good night’ does the reverse. ‘Let’s chill out’ closes the blinds and sets the lights low in the chill out room, activates a bubble tube via a smart plug and plays some relaxing music. You can also control the Robovac (robot vacuum cleaner) and give basic commands for the TVs using voice control, and we were able to replicate all of these through Voiceitt.
Sarah Field is a Learning Support worker at Portland College, and a participant in the Nuvoic Project. Sarah trained Voiceitt to recognise how she says each of these commands, and in the following video you can see her testing them out.
Through the visit, we were able to get experience using Voiceitt with a fantastic range of Smart Home equipment, which we hope to share with other participants and organisations – please email liz@karten-network.org.uk for more information.
Huge thanks to Sarah and the team at Portland College, for inviting us to visit and for all your help while we were there!