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Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Why am I calling my television silly?

I received an Invoca voice activated TV remote 3.0 for Christmas from my sister. It's a great gift, especially for someone who cannot turn the channels on a TV with a conventional remote.

It takes rechargeable batteries, which I didn't have, so I ordered those online and just got them today. After charging the Invoca remote, I synched it to my TV and cable box via the automatic function. Once that was done, I was ready to program some commands in.

I started with the ones in the brochure, such as "channel up/down", "TV power". All went well. Within a few minutes, however , my TV began to act as if it was haunted. Channels changed without warning - the TV went off and I swore I heard a voice from inside saying "I'm baaccckkk!" (OK that was my imagination.)

I decided, however, to set it up to use a keyword to precede each command so that the noise from the TV wouldn't cause the remote to "take over" my TV. You can imagine the fun it was to pick a keyword. How tempting to choose things like "Cyborg", "Robot", "Jeeves" , "HAL" - but I tried quite a few and realized I needed a distinctive word.

"This is silly, " I said to my cat. Then I tried the word "Silly" and it worked great. Silly it was.

So the keyword "silly" precedes everything I say. I am saying phrases like "Silly- Louder", "Silly- That other Sports channel", "Silly-Quiet" (that's the mute function). It's rather fun.

I can even program macro strings into this, to do things like play a VCR tape. You just enter a string of commands which are clearly outlined in the brochure. It's quite easy.

So as I sit here watching football instead of just one channel that I can't turn off, my only complaint is that when the announcer remarked "Now that's a silly play" the channel switched to Bravo. Not a problem.

I say "Silly- previous channel."

I give this 5 stars.

1 comment:

Rosemary said...

Reminds me of the "password" that parents are supposed to teach their children, so that someone can't trick them into believing a person has come to pick them up because a parent is hurt, etc. Ours was "peanut butter." ROTFL

Seriously, who would have thought that the TV could give commands to itself. I'm glad it was that simple to fix, and you are busy enjoying more than one channel.