Assignment 1 – Voice Activated Systems Meryem Gurel PowerPack : Physical Computing, Wireless Networks and Internet of Things 10/7/2013 German W Aparicio

1- VoiceIR ENVIRONMENTAL VOICE CONTROLLER CONFIGURATOR The VoiceIR Environmental Voice Controller ECU (Voice Me) provides complete, 100% hands-free voice control for the mobility for devices which controlled by Infrared remote. FEATURES Excellent voice-recognition quality Intelligent Voice Guide - interactive, user-friendly voice guide intuitively instructs you what to do during setup and use. Support for 1-4 users and up to 120 voice commands [4 ‘voice command groups’ with 30 voice commands per group] Omni-Directional Infrared Emission - Circular spread powerful infrared emission beams leave no dead spots in a room. Convenient Extender Handset - optional single button to activate VoiceIR manually plus manual operation of volume control and channel browsing. er_embedded&v=PNG8J0oc008

2- TOSHIBA VOICE-CONTROLLED AIR CONDITIONERS Toshiba Home Appliances Corp announced the "Daiseikai VoiCE NDR" series of home air conditioners, which can be operated by voice. When a voice command is issued to the voice controller of the NDR series, the controller recognizes it and sends an order to the indoor unit via infrared communication. Twenty-one items (26 words) such as "heating," "timer" and "stop" are preregistered in the recognition circuit of the voice controller, and the air conditioner conducts operations that correspond to those items. For example: the command "Play Movie" could dim the lights, turn on the TV, turn on the DVD player, turn on the stereo, set the stereo to DVD surround sound, and finally start the movie playing. The voice controller has a simple design with only a start button and a notification lamp. It contains a voice recognition circuit, microphone and speaker. The voice recognition circuit can be activated by pressing the start button, clapping hands, etc. And the air conditioner starts operations when a registered word is mouthed.

3- SIRI Once the the Siri microphone button is touched, whatever is said is recorded, compressed and sent to Apple's data centers where Apple hosts Nuance's speech-to-text and Siri's AI-like natural language processing engine. Siri then figures out what has been said. Depending upon the inquiry, Siri creates a voice response and either sends it back to the iPhone or performs queries and sends the voice response file and data back to the handset. The iPhone's Siri Digital Assistant is given “life” by vocalizing answers to the question asked and, if merited, displaying information obtained via the Siri Backend services (e.g., Google search results) or via the user's iPhone resources (e.g., Map app). Importantly, Siri also somehow manages conversations—multi-part exchanges between a user's iPhone and Siri’s data center resources. So when Siri needs more information to fulfill a request it asks the user for more information without forgetting what was originally asked. This is critical to making a digital assistant conversational. This ability to maintain a "conversion" by supporting multiple exchanges is essential to making Siri work as smoothly as it does today.

3-VOICE ACTIVATED COMMUNICATION SYSTEM AND PROGRAM GUIDE A subscriber unit for use with a program guide selection system is described. The program guide selection system provides program guide information which is communicated over a communication network and includes operating characteristics of a communication system and selection codes which are associated with the operating characteristics of the communication system. The subscriber unit includes: a receiver for receiving the program guide information and the selection codes associated with the operating characteristics, a display for displaying the program guide information and the selection codes to a subscriber, a microphone which is employed by the subscriber, when the subscriber identifies on the display a selection code which is associated with a requested one of the operating characteristics, to orally input a voice expression which includes the selection code, and a speech recognition unit which is coupled to the microphone and is operative to enable selection of the requested one of the operating characteristics in response to the voice expression.