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I was spring cleaning my Visual Studio projects folder (which had hundreds of ‘ConsoleApplication <number>’ projects) and came across quite a cool project I had created to fix the ‘music selection’ problem I had. I have a couple of dev machines, and my music is on one particular one. Whilst I could stream it, I figured it would be easier (and look much cooler) if I could just say the name and have it play. It was also less distracting while I was zoned in on coding something. Why not?

At that time, it wasn’t complete and limited to a small group of hardcoded files, before I got sidetracked with work projects. I decided to update it and within 20 minutes, I was launching songs on my computer using my voice. Any song. On my computer. With my voice :). I’ve been using it for some time and then figured it’s probably something other technophiles would like to see.

I had been meaning to post a video of it some time before, but figured I could improve on it. I have many ideas of cools things that can now be achieved with my music. As a proof of concept, I hacked together a few ‘demo’ projects to show some of the potential. You can watch the video, but if you want a summary:

1) You can launch the song, with your voice, with any microphone (standard, webcam, Kinect etc..)

2) You can control the media player with your voice (play/pause/next etc..)

3) You can use your WIndows Phone to launch the song. Yup, you don’t even have to be in the same room. Just speak into your phone, from anywhere that’s connected to your computer’s network, and the track will launch. Nothing like waking up and having the computer play the song you want (rather than the hit-and-miss random selection) without you having to go near the computer or scroll through the phone.

4) As a developer, when I’m working on my other machine, my main monitor slowly flicks through desktop wallpapers. Kind of boring. Instead, if I want to see the music video of a song in my collection, I can now use voice control to launch it in YouTube. Very easily extendable to show live versions of the song if preferred.

That’s the summary, here’s the video:

Note: To prevent any speculation or comments about it - this has not been inspired by Siri. It was inspired by the breaking of concentration when having to switch machines to change songs. That, and the cool factor of walking into the room, saying the name of the song and having it play without you even looking at the computer.