speech recognition

38 Articles

Ten Minute TensorFlow Speech Recognition

March 24, 2017 by 17 Comments

Like a lot of people, we’ve been pretty interested in TensorFlow, the Google neural network software. If you want to experiment with using it for speech recognition, you’ll want to check out [Silicon Valley Data Science’s] GitHub repository which promises you a fast setup for a speech recognition demo. It even covers which items you need to install if you are using a CUDA GPU to accelerate processing or if you aren’t.

Another interesting thing is the use of TensorBoard to visualize the resulting neural network. This tool offers up a page in your browser that lets you visualize what’s really going on inside the neural network. There’s also speech data in the repository, so it is practically a one-stop shop for getting started. If you haven’t seen TensorBoard in action, you might enjoy the video from Google, below.

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Arduino Clock Is HAL 1000

December 11, 2016 by 39 Comments

In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 — the neurotic computer — had a birthday in 1992 (for some reason, in the book it is 1997). In the late 1960s, that date sounded impossibly far away, but now it seems like a distant memory. The only thing is, we are only now starting to get computers with voice I/O that are practical and even they are a far cry from HAL.

[GeraldF6] built an Arduino-based clock. That’s nothing new but thanks to a MOVI board (ok, shield), this clock has voice input and output as you can see in the video below. Unlike most modern speech-enabled devices, the MOVI board (and, thus, the clock) does not use an external server in the cloud or any remote processing at all. On the other hand, the speech quality isn’t what you might expect from any of the modern smartphone assistants that talk. We estimate it might be about 1/9 the power of the HAL 9000.

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A DIY, Visual Alexa

October 17, 2016 by 21 Comments

Talking to computers is all the rage right now. We are accustomed to using voice to communicate with each other, so that makes sense. However, there’s a distinct difference between talking to a human over a phone line and conversing face-to-face. You get a lot of visual cues in person compared to talking over a phone or radio.

Today, most voice-enabled systems are like taking to a computer over the phone. It gets the job done, but you don’t always get the most benefit. To that end, [Youness] decided to marry an OLED display to his Alexa to give visual feedback about the current state of Alexa. It is a work in progress, but you can see two incarnations of the idea in the videos below.

A Raspberry Pi provides the horsepower and the display. A Python program connects to the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to understand what to do. AVS provides several interfaces for building voice-enabled applications:

  • Speech Recognition/Synthesis – Understand and generate speech.
  • Alerts – Deal with events such as timers or a user utterance.
  • AudioPlayer – Manages audio playback.
  • PlaybackController – Manages playback queue.
  • Speaker – Controls volume control.
  • System – Provides client information to AVS.

We’ve seen AVS used to create an Echo clone (in a retro case, though). We also recently looked at the Google speech API on the Raspberry Pi.

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Raspberry Pi Want A Cracker?

October 14, 2016 by 15 Comments

If you watch the old original Star Trek, you’ll notice that the computers on board the Enterprise don’t look much like our computers (unless you count the little 3.5 inch floppies that looked pretty close to the real thing). Then again, the Enterprise didn’t need keyboards and screens since the computers did a pretty good job of listening and speaking to humans.

We aren’t quite to the point where you can just ask the computer some fuzzy open-ended question like Captain Kirk did, but we do have things like Echo, Siri, and Google Now that do a fair job of listening to you and replying. In fact, Google provides an API that can do speech recognition and generation. [Giulio] used some common Python libraries to add speech I/O to a Raspberry Pi.

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Talking Star Trek

June 8, 2016 by 34 Comments

Speech generation and recognition have come a long way. It wasn’t that long ago that we were in a breakfast place and endured 30 minutes of a teenaged girl screaming “CALL JUSTIN TAYLOR!” into her phone repeatedly, with no results. Now speech on phones is good enough you might never use the keyboard unless you want privacy. Every time we ask Google or Siri a question and get an answer it makes us feel like we are living in Star Trek.

[Smcameron] probably feels the same way. He’s been working on a Star Trek-inspired bridge simulator called “Space Nerds in Space” for some time. He decided to test out the current state of Linux speech support by adding speech commands and response to it. You can see the results in the video below.

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Roll Your Own Amazon Echo On A Raspberry Pi

March 31, 2016 by 40 Comments

Speech recognition coupled with AI is the new hotness. Amazon’s Echo is a pretty compelling device, for a largish chunk of change. But if you’re interested in building something similar yourself, it’s just gotten a lot easier. Amazon has opened up a GitHub with instructions and code that will get you up and running with their Alexa Voice Service in short order.

If you read Hackaday as avidly as we do, you’ve already read that Amazon opened up their SDK (confusingly called a “Skills Kit”) and that folks have started working with it already. This newest development is Amazon’s “official” hello-world demo, for what that’s worth.

There are also open source alternatives, so if you just want to get something up and running without jumping through registration and licensing hoops, you’ve got that option as well.

Whichever way you slice it, there seems to be a real interest in having our machines listen to us. It’s probably time for an in-depth comparison of the various options. If you know of a voice recognition system that runs on something embeddable — a single-board computer or even a microcontroller — and you’d like to see us look into it, post up in the comments. We’ll see what we can do.

Thanks to [vvenesect] for the tip!

You Speak, Your Scope Obeys

March 29, 2016 by 17 Comments

We’ve been scratching our heads about the various voice-recognition solutions out there. What would you really want to use one for? Turning off the lights in your bedroom without getting up? Sure, it has some 2001: A Space Odyssey flare flair, but frankly we’ve already got a remote control for that. The best justification for voice control, in our mind, is controlling something while your hands or eyes are already busy.

[Patrick Sébastien Coulombe] clearly has both of his hands on his oscilloscope probes. That’s why he developed Speech2SCPI, a quick mash-up of voice recognition and an oscilloscope control protocol. It combines the Julius open-source speech recognizer project with the Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments (SCPI) syntax to make his scope obey his every command. You’ve got to watch the video below the break to believe how well it works. It even handles his French accent.

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