👏 The Clapper 👏: trigger actions by clapping (looking for feedback and testers)

[jxlarrea]

This one started with a new Echo Show 8 running Kiosk Satellite on my night table. With the screensaver running, I kept wanting to peek at the dashboard without reaching over and touching the screen. Same thing with camera views: lying in bed, hearing something outside and wanting the camera up without getting up. The tablet already listens for a wake word, so it hit me that the answer was about forty years old: The Clapper.

So I'm adding Claps as a new trigger on the Gestures page. You map 2, 3 or 4 claps to any of the existing gesture actions: start or stop the screensaver, show a camera view, jump to a dashboard view, run a script or automation, call a service, fire an event, open an app, and so on.

Demo Video

2 claps: dismiss screensaver - 3 claps: show default camera view

video_trimmed_720p.mp4

A few things worth knowing about how it works:

• Detection is plain arithmetic on the microphone stream. No models, no cloud, no extra CPU worth mentioning, so it runs fine on the weakest supported devices without disturbing wake word detection.
• It works with or without Voice Satellite. If the integration's wake word detection is running natively, clap detection rides the microphone that is already open at zero extra cost. If you do not use Voice Satellite at all, the app opens the microphone itself while at least one claps mapping exists.
• Claps are ignored while a voice interaction is in progress, while the satellite is muted, in Lockdown Mode, and while kiosk mode's Disable Gestures is on. Muting really means muting: the microphone closes, claps included.
• Thresholds adapt to the room, so it keeps working over background music or a TV, and a quiet capture path does not break it.

Please update to the latest version to get access to this feature and let me know how it works for you!

[meiser79]

Hi,

I like this feature a lot!! And you can imagine, what comes now. :-) There's a but...

I see many false triggers from the background noise, e.g. when my child plays near the device with its toys.

Is there any chance to make the algorithm listen more to "real" hand claps?

Thanks again for the nice feature.
Best Regards,
meiser79

[jxlarrea]

Thanks for testing and for the report! You are right and the reason is that a toy knocking on a table produces almost exactly a clap's acoustic shape (a sharp, loud, quickly-dying burst), so the detector needed more than the impulse itself to go on.

The next release makes clap sequences prove they are deliberate: they have to come out of a calm moment rather than ongoing clatter, keep an even rhythm, and stay at one loudness, which is how a person commanding a device claps and how random play noise usually does not.

On top of that there is a new Clap detection setting on the Gestures page with a Strict mode that tightens all of those checks and requires louder claps, made precisely for rooms like yours.

Two more tips that help a lot: prefer 3 or 4 claps over 2 for anything that must never misfire (two similar bangs in a row are the hardest case to tell apart), and after the update the App Logs record why a clap sequence was accepted or discarded, so if it still misbehaves a snippet from there will tell us exactly what it heard.

Would love to hear how it holds up against the toy test once the release is out!