Hi all,

I have Airfoil, and at this point 1 Airport Express setup in my bedroom. I plan on getting a couple more airport expresses for a couple extra speakers downstairs. Anyway, even with all of this, we still have to shout upstairs or downstairs to talk to somebody...I wish we had an intercom, but of course it can't be one of those ones that uses electrical lines....I think I remember my dad having one years ago that used the phone lines, but I don't see those anymore....

So could anyone recommend an intercom type setup, where us humans could use it to talk to each other in different rooms/floors, talk to the computer with voice recognition, and allow the computer to notify us with TTS ?

I remember on the old intercoms we had a push-to-talk button, it would be cool if the computer could listen in as well in case we said the keyword it is listening for...hope you catch my drift here...

I'm afraid that multiple omnidirectional microphones connected back to a single Mac isn't, as far as I know, doable without a LOT of work. You'd need:

1) Individual microphones, connected either by wifi (not sure how much wifi microphones cost or if there is even an omnidirectional one available) or by some USB-over-IP type setup
2) Software that would allow you to connect and listen to multiple microphones, which would then do some speech-to-text translation
3) Which, hopefully, would then communicate with Indigo somehow

I'm sure there are high-end solutions out there but probably not Mac-based. Of course, text-to-speech is quite doable with just Airport Expresses and Airfoil. The new Airfoil plugin will be available with the next beta release so everyone can try it out.

For two-way communication, I recommend a decidedly low-tech approach: almost every cordless phone system that supports multiple handsets that I've owned in the past 10 years has the ability to do intercom between the handsets. I just spent $79 on a 4 handset vtech cordless system at Walmart that does it. It has a nice distinctive ring when one handset calls the other so it's easy to hear and differentiate from a normal phone call.