blocks the sides and reduces it effectiveness severely.
Another thing that I noticed is that voice recognition
seems to react better to deep voices than higher ones. It
wouldn’t always trigger for children or some women with
high voices, but usually with some practice it worked well
for most folks. Of course, this often led to some startled
humans when the software finally triggered and Pete’s
booming voice began speaking. Actually, that effect
became quite entertaining (for some of us, anyway).
I told the little kids to speak in deeper voices which was
often hysterical, and that got groups of the kids and their
parents laughing. Another thing that became apparent is
the command sentences work better if they are very
different than other sentences. For example, “Turn light on”
is almost the same as “Turn light off.” Voice recognition
may have trouble discerning the difference. Longer
sentences actually work better than shorter ones or single
words. A control word like “JARVIS” before the command
sentence helps a lot.
Well, voice recognition is tricky. It can work pretty well
in a quiet environment. It has difficulty working with a
noisy environment and higher pitched voices. It is possible
to get a computer to talk to itself with some
hardware in between, probably with a
microcontroller and just a serial to TTL
converter cable connected in between. I
haven’t tried that yet, but it should work.
Another thing that I found that is really
fun is to remove the control word “JARVIS”
and just let the system run while the TV or
radio is on. Periodically, it will trigger off of
the audio, say its text to speech sentence,
trigger Eliza, and then continue on talking to
itself.
I guess for now, folks may have to learn
to speak robot. Well, just a little. Talk about
needing a psychotherapist ... SV
SERVO 09.2016 41
Weblinks
Speech Recognition
BitVoicer by Bitsophia
www.bitsophia.com/en-US/BitVoicer/ Overview.aspx
Stereo 20W Class D Audio
Amplifier — MAX9744
Adafruit
www.adafruit.com/products/1752
LED Color Organ
(now a kit from Jameco)
www.jameco.com/Jameco/worksh
op/video/ ledcolororgan.html
www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/st
ores/servlet/Product_10001_10001
_2155541_-1
Shotgun Microphone
www.walmart.com/ip/AudioTechn
ica-ATR-6550-Video-Camera-
Shotgun-Mic/13059772
Some video of Cal Averas using
the BitVoicer speech recognition
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrtIIJ
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