voice recognition

29 Articles

A circuit board in the shape of a business card is shown. The circuitry is confined to the left side of the board, and the rest is used for text.

(Neural) Networking With A Business Card

November 15, 2025 by 13 Comments

A PCB business card is a great way for electrical engineers to impress employers with their design skills, but the software they run can be just as impressive as the card itself. As a programmer with an interest in embedded machine learning, [Dave McKinnon] wanted a card that showcased his skills, so he designed one that runs voice recognition.

[Dave] specifically wanted to run a neural network on his card, but needed to make it small enough to run on a microcontroller. Voice recognition looked like a good fit for this, since audio can be represented with relatively little data, a microphone is cheap and easy to add to a circuit board, and there was already an example of someone running such a voice recognition network on an Arduino. To fit the neural network into 46 kB, it only distinguishes the words “one” through “nine,” and displays its guess on an LED seven-segment display. [Dave] first prototyped the system with an Arduino, then designed the circuit board around an RP2040.

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Taco Bell To Bring Voice AI Ordering To Hundreds Of US Drive-Throughs

August 2, 2024 by 41 Comments

Drive-throughs are a popular feature at fast-food places, where you can get some fast grub without even leaving your car. For the fast-food companies running them they are also a big focus of automation, with the ideal being a voice assistant that can take orders and pass them on to the (still human) staff. This probably in lieu of being able to make customers use the touch screens-equipped order kiosks that are common these days. Pushing for this drive-through automation change is now Taco Bell, or specifically the Yum Brands parent company.

This comes interestingly enough shortly after McDonalds deemed its own drive-through voice assistant to be a failure and removing it. Meanwhile multiple Taco Bell in the US in 13 states and five KFC restaurants in Australia are trialing the system, with results apparently encouraging enough to start expanding it. Company officials are cited as it having ‘improved order accuracy’, ‘decreased wait times’ and ‘increased profits’. Considering the McDonalds experience which was pretty much the exact opposite in all of these categories we will remain with bated breath. Feel free to share your Taco Bell or other Voice AI-enabled drive-through experiences in the comments. Maybe whoever Yum Brands contracted for their voice assistant did a surprisingly decent job, which would be a pleasant change.

Top image: Taco Bell – Vadnais Heights, MN (Credit: Gabriel Vanslette, Wikimedia)

Hackaday Prize 2023: A DIY Voice-Control Module

May 15, 2023 by 13 Comments

If science fiction taught us anything, it’s that voice control was going to be the human-machine interface of the future. [Dennis] has now whipped up a tutorial that lets you add a voice control module to any of your own projects.

The voice control module uses a Raspberry Pi 4 as the brains of the operation, paired with a Seeed Studio ReSpeaker 4-microphone array. The Pi provides a good amount of processing power to crunch through the audio, while the mic array captures high-quality audio from any direction, which is key to reliable performance. Rhasspy is used as the software element, which is responsible for processing audio in a variety of languages to determine what the user is asking for. Based on the voice commands received, Rhasspy can then run just about anything you could possibly require, from sending MQTT smart home commands to running external programs.

If you’ve always dreamed of whipping up your own version of Jarvis from Iron Man, or you just want a non-cloud solution to turn your lights on and off, [Dennis’s] tutorial is a great place to start. Video after the break.

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A small speaker with an LCD showing chatbot responses

AI-Powered Speaker Is A Chatbot You Can Actually Chat With

April 22, 2023 by 20 Comments

AI-powered chatbots are pretty cool, but most still require you to type your question on a keyboard and read an answer from a screen. It doesn’t have to be like that, of course: with a few standard tools, you can turn a chatbot into a machine that literally chats, as [Hoani Bryson] did. He decided to make a standalone voice-operated ChatGPT client that you can actually sit next to and have a conversation with.

The base of the project is a USB speaker, to which [Hoani] added a Raspberry Pi, a Teensy, a two-line LCD and a big red button. When you press the button, the Pi listens to your speech and converts it to text using the OpenAI voice transcription feature. It then sends the resulting text to ChatGPT through its API and waits for its response, which it turns into sound again through the eSpeak speech synthesizer. The LCD, driven by the Teensy, shows the current status of the machine and also provides live subtitles while the machine is talking.

To spice up the AI box’s appearance, [Hoani] also added an LED ring which shows a spectrogram of the audio being generated. This small addition really makes the thing come alive, turning it into what looks like a classic Sci-Fi movie prop. Except that this one’s real, of course – we are actually living in the future, with human-like AI all around us.

All code, mostly written in Go, is freely available on [Hoani]’s GitHub page. It also includes a separate audio processing library called toot that [Hoani] wrote to help him interface with the micophone and do spectral analysis. Anyone with basic electronic skills can now build their own AI companion and talk to it – something that ham radio operators have been doing for a while.

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My Glasses Hear Everything I’m Not Saying!

April 10, 2023 by 4 Comments

There was a time when you saw someone walking down the street talking to no one, they were probably crazy. Now you have to look for a Bluetooth headset. But soon they may just be quietly talking to their glasses. Cornell University researchers have EchoSpeech which use sonar-like sensors in a pair of glasses to watch your lips and mouth move. From that data, they can figure out what you are saying, even if you don’t really say it out loud. You can see a video of the glasses below.

There are a few advantages to a method like this. For one thing, you can speak commands even in places where you can’t talk out loud to a microphone. There have been HAL 9000-like attempts to read lips with cameras, but this is power-hungry and video tends to be data intensive.

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Retrotechtacular: Voice Controlled Typewriter Science Project In 1958

April 6, 2023 by 17 Comments

Hackaday readers might know [Victor Scheinman] as the pioneer who built some of the first practical robot arms. But what was a kid like that doing in high school? Thanks to a film about the 1958 New York City Science Fair, we know he was building a voice-activated typewriter. Don’t believe it? Watch it yourself below, thanks to [David Hoffman].

Ok, we know. Voice typing is no big deal today, and, frankly, [Victor’s] attempt isn’t going to amaze anyone today. But think about it. It was 1958! All those boat anchor ham radios behind him aren’t antiques. That’s what radios looked like in 1958. Plus, the kid is 16 years old. We’d say he did pretty darn good!

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The Voice Of ChatGPT Is Now On The Air

January 28, 2023 by 39 Comments

AIs can now apparently carry on a passable conversation, depending on what you classify as passable conversation. The quality of your local pub’s banter aside, an AI stuck in a text box doesn’t have much of a living quality. human. An AI that holds a conversation aloud, though, is another thing entirely. [William Franzin] has whipped up just that on amateur radio.  (Video, embedded below.)

The concept is straightforward, if convoluted. A DSTAR digital voice transmission is received, which is then transcoded to regular digital audio. The audio then goes through a voice recognition engine, and that is used as a question for a ChatGPT AI. The AI’s output is then fed to a text-to-speech engine, and it speaks back with its own voice over the airwaves.

[William] demonstrates the system, keying up a transmitter to ask the AI how to get an amateur radio licence. He gets a pretty comprehensive reply in return.

The result is that radio amateurs can call in to ChatGPT with questions, and can receive actual spoken responses from the AI. We can imagine within the next month, AIs will be chatting it up all over the airwaves with similar setups. After all, a few robots could only add more diversity to the already rich and varied ham radio community. Video after the break.

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