A Voice Driven Universal Remote Control App

Abstract

It is not rare to see a user using smartphones in Android platform with personal computers in Window platform. One of the most important reasons for users to continue using Window platform is that they afraid of learning new operating systems and thus Window platform has been the best seller for many years. Also, there is a common misconception that MacBook does not get along with Android phones for some reasons. Therefore, it is hard to find Android applications that connect with MacBook in the Google Play Store even though the global unit sales of MacBook have been increased for three times from 2006 to 2013. There is a foreseeable need for developing Android applications that support MacBook and thus this project introduces an Android version of voice driven remote control application which controls the MacBook and other electronic devices at home such as DVD players, televisions etc. The application uses two Android libraries, which are ConsumerIrManager and SpeechRecognizer. ConsumerIrManager is used to send out infrared signals from phone towards the target devices and SpeechRecognizer is used to convert the voice to text strings. Finally, the communication between the Android phone and MacBook is operated using socket programming.