A Speech Interaction System for an Ambient Assisted Living Scenario

In this work we describe a speech recognition system aimed at controlling various apparatus of an intelligent home. The system is especially tailored, and ad-hoc optimizations and strategies have been implemented, to make it suitable to operate unobtrusively in the ambient, requiring that the user only installs small and cheap audio front-ends that will capture his spoken commands. A recognition back-end, running either as a network service reached over the Internet or on a PC in the user’s home, performs the hard work of processing the data and turning it into commands, which are sent back to the desired actuator in the home. A case study involving the voice control of a DALI lighting system is presented, together with ideas and results on how to improve recognition accuracy and command spotting efficiency of a system which, by its very nature, might have to deal with audio captured from a distance and great amounts of background noise and unrelated sounds.