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Speech I/O for Embedded Applications

Issue 206

From Issue #206
June 2011

Aug 31, 2011  By Rick Rogers
 in
Is the world ready for speech-enabled embedded devices? Now the technology is here for usable speech recognition and synthesis. See how you can use it in your own embedded applications.
From Here

We've barely scratched the surface of speech user interfaces, even for a checklist application. Depending on your embedded system, you'd have to give the user a way to start and end the checklist app, and ideally you'd have a way of signaling to the user when the app is listening. PocketSphinx prompts with “Listening...” and is supposed to terminate on saying “goodbye” (that doesn't work for me—maybe it's my Texas accent?). The source code for PocketSphinx (labeled continuous.c) comes with the package, so you can experiment with it. There are many, many optimizations you could make to both speech recognition and synthesis, using restricted vocabularies, different voice databases and just tuning the parameters.

And, what about a more general, practical speech user interface for embedded devices? The tools are available—how creative can you be?

Resources

eSpeak: espeak.sourceforge.net/index.html

Carnegie Mellon University's Sphinx Group: cmusphinx.sourceforge.net

Carnegie Mellon's Flite Page: www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite

Genesi EFIKA MX: www.genesi-usa.com/products/efika

World Health Organization Safe Surgery Checklist: www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/ss_checklist/en/index.html

Rick Rogers has been a professional embedded developer for more than 30 years. Now specializing in mobile application software, when Rick isn't writing software for a living, he's writing books and magazine articles like this one. He welcomes feedback on this article at portmobileapps@gmail.com.

______________________

Rick Rogers has been a professional embedded developer for more than 30 years. Now specializing in mobile application software, when Rick isn't writing software for a living, he's writing books and magazine articles like this one.

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