When we say voice control, the first term to be considered is Speech Recognition i.e. making the system to understand human voice. Speech recognition is a technology where the system understands the words (not its meaning) given through speech.

Speech is an ideal method for robotic control and communication. The speech recognition circuit we will outline, functions independently from the robot’s main intelligence [central processing unit (CPU)]. This is a good thing because it doesn’t take any of the robot’s main CPU processing power for word recognition. The CPU must merely poll the speech circuit’s recognition lines occasionally to check if a command has been issued to the robot.

We can even improve upon this by connecting the recognition line to one of the robot’s CPU interrupt lines. By doing this, a recognized word would cause an interrupt, letting the CPU know a recognized word had been spoken. The advantage of using an interrupt is that polling the circuit’s recognition line occasionally would no longer be necessary, further reducing any CPU overhead.

Voice Controlled Robot

Another advantage to this stand-alone speech-recognition circuit (SRC) is its programmability. You can program and train the SRC to recognize the unique words you want recognized. The SRC can be easily interfaced to the robot’s CPU.

To control and command an appliance (computer, VCR, TV security system, etc.) by speaking to it, will make it easier, while increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of working with that device.At its most basic level speech recognition allows the user to perform parallel tasks, (i.e. hands and eyes are busy elsewhere) while continuing to work with the computer or appliance.

Robotics is an evolving technology. There are many approaches to building robots, and no one can be sure which method or technology will be used 100 years from now. Like biological systems, robotics is evolving following the Darwinian model of survival of the fittest.

Suppose you want to control a menu driven system. What is the most striking property that you can think of?

Well the first thought that came to our mind is that the range of inputs in a menu driven system is limited. In fact, by using a menu all we are doing is limiting the input domain space. Now, this is one characteristic which can be very useful in implementing the menu in stand alone systems. For example think of the pine menu or a washing machine menu. How many distinct commands do they require?

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