EasyVR and the Emic 2

So, after looking long at the AlexaPI, I determined that I could not yet use it to send result-action-commands directly to the robot – I needed to look further…I came across the EasyVR 3, an elegant voice-recognition board that could bolt onto an Arduino…

The EasyVR 3 allows both speaker-dependent as well as speaker-independent voice recognition…speaker independent is more robust in that it allows recognition of anyone’s voice, but by definition is resource heavy and usually has a limited vocabulary, whereas speaker dependent can be trained for virtually unlimited vocabulary, but will respond only to the trainer’s voice – one advantage though is that speaker-dependent can be potentially used in a security application, since it only responds to the one person’s voice…

Veear makes an Arduino shield so that the board simply attaches to the Arduino and is ready to go…there is also an Arduino library available that makes an EasyVR project pretty easy to get going…Sparkfun makes a kit for assembling the EasyVR shield for less than $50…

I got a kit and played around with examples and code I found here…the programming is straight-forward – the speaker-independent vocabulary even includes many of the basic commands (forward, back, right, left, etc.) you would use to voice-direct a robot, and, since the shield is sitting on an Arduino, which meant voice-directed-action-results should be easy to create, I figured this might be an interim solution while I waited for the AlexaPi approach to mature…

I figured out potential voice-recognition device, but, I also wanted the robot to talk, so, some more research and I found the Emic 2…the Emic 2 is a text-to-speech (TTS) board that again can easily connect to an Arduino, so, I figured it would be easy to include voice output as a part of my action-result – things were looking up, even though there would be limitations due to the limited voice-recognition scope…

About the time I began bread-boarding my EasyVR/Emic 2/Arduino, I stumbled upon snips – ah, maybe the limitations would not be quite so limiting as I expected!