Hands-free Voice-enabled Interface to Web Applications for Smart Home Environments

ended

Nowadays, it is becoming increasingly affordable to enhance the home environment with several automation schemes, allowing remote control of e.g., heating/cooling, communication, lighting, media, etc. Such smart home functionalities are essential for people with disabilities and the elderly, as they not only provide assistive control of important everyday functionalities, but may prove to be life-saving in case of emergency. However, smart home functionalities may become useless for people who need those most, if they cannot be accessed via a natural, easy to use, interface. The central objective of LISTEN is to design and implement a complete system, including both the software and hardware components, enabling robust hands-free large-vocabulary voice-based access to Internet applications in smart homes. This would allow the users to have natural control (i.e., using their voice) of the smart-home web-enabled functionalities (e.g., turning on/off web-enabled “smart” appliances), but also to access specific Internet applications (e.g., web search, email dictation, access to social networks). A truly hands-free system operation of the voice interface is equally important: users will not have to turn towards a microphone or other device, or wear a headset. Therefore, LISTEN will develop (a) a robust hands-free speech capture system operating as a wireless acoustic sensor network (WASN), specifically designed for the smart home, and (b) a large-vocabulary automatic speech recognition system optimised for accessing web applications and controlling web-enabled smart home automation functionalities. LISTEN pushes the boundaries of current state-of-the-art by bridging the gap between the acoustic front-end and automatic speech recognition research communities, with the common goal of developing a smart-home-specific natural voice interface to web services.