February
1998, Issue 91
Low-Cost
Voice Recognition
by
Brad Stewart
Brad’s
Tiny Voice—based on an ’HC705 and powered off a 9-V
battery—can be trained to recognize up to 16 command
templates and costs less than $5. Toys, voice-activated
padlocks, and remote controls had better listen up.
Voice recognition has come a long way
in the past five years, due mainly to the advent of
cheap and powerful PCs equipped with Pentiums and MMX
technology. Performance continues to improve to the
point where parts of this article were comfortably voice-dictated
via Kurzweil VoicePlus.
But,
this performance comes at a cost. You need fast Pentiums
with MMX, at least 16 MB of DRAM, and even more disk
stroage.
What
if your application has a budget of a couple dollars?
Can you still embed some form of voice recognition or
voice command and control into your product?
In
this article, I’ll show you how to implement a voice-command
system for under $5. I conclude with some application
examples and recommendations to improve the system even
further.
