I don’t know if you appreciate the sheer quantity of Google Alerts we sift through every day so that we might bring you the most relevant and pressing speech technology news on our main site, but we have one former staffer out on workman’s comp because she literally drowned in it. As you can imagine, in that dangerous deluge we see a lot of weird stuff—especially when searching for terms as vague as “VUI” or “ASR.”
I bet you didn’t know, for instance, that in addition to our familiar “automatic speech recognition,” “ASR” is the acronym for the foremost action sportswear tradeshow, or that “VUI” is not just “voice user interface,” but also seems to be one of the most common words in the Vietnamese language.
Well, from the ethers of that random pile, we bring you a recent robot video of speech tech interest.
Apparently, some enterprising young student, “rotary9k,” has built a Parallax kit Boe-Bot capable of following basic speech-enabled commands. Watch it in action! We were particularly impressed by the robot’s “stalker” mode.
The best part, however, you can build your own!
The robot uses the freely available Java-based Sphinx4 speech engine. The engine is an open source collaboration between Carnegie-Mellon University and the laboratories of Sun Microsystems, Mitsubishi, and Hewlett Packard. Get it here and use it for your own twisted purposes!
As for the robot, rotary9k was so kind as to give a spartan little explanation of how he voice enabled his. Replicate it at your whim.
But wait….what if tiny Boe-Bot doesn’t quite meet your heavy-bot speech-enabled needs? You can choose from numerous other designs at the Society of Robots tutorial page and forums! Voice enable any and all of them! The possibilities are endless, dear reader.
For our part, we here at Speech Tech are trying to figure out how to incorporate this USB rocket launcher with voice-enabled stalker bot technology.
If you have your own Sunday project voice-enabled robot you’re working on, let us know! Who knows? Maybe we’ll write up a post about it here!
