Voice recognition used to be something that they only had in the movies. Sci-fi films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey featured intelligent computers that could understand human speech. Today, it’s a reality and a feature that’s commonly found on everything from handheld phones to industrial equipment.
Today, we’re going to be taking a brief look at what you need to consider if you want to make a voice recognition system so that you know what you’re in for.
The Advantages of Voice Recognition
Voice recognition has a lot of advantages. Maybe you want to train your computer to take commands without having to click around everywhere, or perhaps you want to create a virtual assistant that will transform your voice into text so you never have to type another word again.
Voice recognition is incredible technology and it’s here to stay. It allows computing to be done at the speed of thought, and cuts out all of the extra time spent typing, clicking, and navigating through a traditional user interface.
The Three Major Steps
Obviously, there are deeper problems that you’ll need to solve when you make a voice recognition system, but these could easily take up hundreds of pages each. Today, we’re going to look at the three major steps which most of the minor steps fall under.
#1- Create a Spectrogram
This will be the heart and soul of your system. A spectrogram will take the sound waves from your voice and transform them into a signal which the computer can understand and iterate. This can be very difficult if done from scratch, but thankfully there are a number of language libraries and third-party programs which can help you along the way.
#2- Program it to Recognize Patterns
Besides just understanding the basics of a language, the system will also need to be programmed to recognize certain speech patterns. It needs to be able to read through accents, predict what a person might say, and fill in the blanks where it couldn’t quite understand a word with the best answer.
All of these things can be done if the system is taught to pick up on small patterns here and there. Within every language, there are specific patterns that can be mathematically organized and programmed into your voice recognition system.
#3- Program Additional Features
After your program is fluent in the language you need it to understand, you need to spend time programming features and execution. Your program needs to recognize certain voice commands which will trigger events to happen. You may want to teach your program to speak back, program your alarm clock, open your email, or turn off your lights. The possibilities are endless.
Using Speech Recognition Libraries
Before we wrap up, we have one final piece of advice for how to make a voice recognition program. Make use of speech recognition libraries.
Quite a few scientific organizations have put together vast digital libraries that are full of different words, phrases, and categorized speech from all over the world. These will prove to be invaluable tools when it comes to setting up the speech recognition part of your system.
So what are you waiting for?
Now it’s your turn to go create the next Jarvis.
