Distributed Speech Recognition for Lighting System Control

This paper presents a distributed speech recognition (DSR) system for home/office lighting control by means of users' voice. In this scheme a back-end processes audio signals and transforms them into commands, so that they can be sent to the desired actuators of the lighting system. This paper discusses in detail the solutions and strategies we adopted to improve recognition accuracy and spotting command efficiency in home/office environments, i.e. in situations that involve distant speech and great amounts of background noise or unrelated sounds. Suitable solutions implemented in this recognition engine are able to detect commands also in a continuous listening context and the used DSR strategies greatly simplify the system installation and maintenance. A case study that implements the voice control of a digital addressable lighting interface (DALI) based lighting system has been selected to show the validity and the performance of the proposed system.