Gone are the times when you had to look for the remote control and get lost in all those buttons just to have a decent temperature in your living room. You can now control your air conditioner by voice, thanks to Toshiba.The Japanese manufacturer has just released the first series of home air conditioners that can be operated by voice and are also energy efficient thanks to the ‘Power Saving’ mode.
Dubbed ‘Daiseikai VoiCE NDR’, the series comprises no less than 13 models, which will be released on the company’s home market starting early November 2011 as 2012 model year products.
If some of you might be a little concerned on how foolish they will look talking to the air conditioner, then you should know that the commands will be, in fact, given to a controller that will process it and transmitted to the indoor unit via infrared communication.
Possibilities are limited though, as there are only 21 items (or 26 words) pre-registered in the recognition circuit of the voice controller, so the air conditioner system will only respond to commands such as ‘heating’, ‘timer’, ‘start’ or ‘stop’. Another memorized phrase, ‘cool breeze’, takes it down to a lower setting to conserve energy.
However, if you also happen to have some other products from Toshiba Home Appliances in the house, such as ED lighting apparatuses equipped with a wireless remote function or even TVs, you’ll be happy to find out that they too can be operated with this voice controller.
The voice controller comes with a start button and a notification lamp, incorporating a voice recognition circuit, microphone and speaker. A melody starts playing when a voice command is recognized, as the command is repeated by a synthesized voice.
In terms of energy efficiency, the device comes with a newly-developed low power consumption "CL3 Wake-up Circuit," which activates the recognition circuit only when it is necessary, and using it for the air conditioner.
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