Applying voice recognition technology for smart home networks

Nowadays, electronics and technologies became an essential part of our daily lives and we cannot abandon them. Moreover, they stormed our homes making them like machines that can understand and be aware of residents' needs and wants inside their homes. For that reason these homes got the name of “Smart Homes”. This paper reviews the concept of smart home, its applications and its system components and technologies used including the networking methods. The review is then extended to introduce the voice recognition technology that enables the control of any device via voice/speech commands. Furthermore, the paper proposes a design of simple model for miniature smart home network that is controlled by voice recognition technology. The various stages of design and implementation of the proposed model are discussed, and followed by a basic evaluation to the performance of the model. Evaluation results confirm the out-performance of this design in short-distance quiet environment using external microphone configuration.

I. Introduction

Many people often forget some appliances or devices such as the lights operated without use in their homes, especially when they go outside their homes entailing energy waste. Even if they remember these devices, they must back to home again to turn them off, wasting their time also. Smart homes have been developed for that purpose; saving energy and time, and, consequently money. Smart home technology is a term combines many parts of information and communication technologies, where the various home components and appliances are communicating via a local network named smart home network. This technology used to monitor, control and carry out functions according to selected criteria. It also makes the automatic communication with the surroundings possible, via the Internet, ordinary fixed telephones or mobile phones [1]. Smart home technology became an important part supports contemporary architectures because of the added intelligence to modern buildings.