I haven't posted in awhile. With the drill battery charger still on backorder, I've been busy working on the software side of this project.
I found a bunch of wall-mountable microphones which are specifically designed to be sensitive to vocal frequencies. Their primary application is for conference rooms but are ideal for voice recognition applications. I was also able to find a microphone mixer that automatically switches on the microphone receiving a vocal input. Today, I ran some tests to see how well the setup would work for voice recognition with a PC. I was able to get about 70% accuracy which is not the greatest but I spent only a little time training. These results are still not entirely conclusive to know if this will work fully installed in the house but I figure I'll give it a try. I wanted to see if at least some recognition would work so I'll go ahead and run the microphone wires throughout the house. The microphones themselves install in single-gang electric device boxes and look just like light switches. Worse case, if voice recognition doesn't work, I can pull the microphones out and patch the holes. Drywall is easy to fix.
So, if the voice recognition does work, it will provide another level of input alongside the various touchscreens to be installed throughout the house. The goal here isn't to replace everything with a voice command and tie myself to that. Everything can still be manually controlled so I wouldn't have to change the way I live my life. The voice command just fills in for those moments where it's more convenient to. After coming home after work and telling the system to playback any telephone messages is a simple example of an application for voice recognition.
