Writing a program which uses voice recogniton... where should I start?

Question

Hello! I'm a design student currently dabbling with Arduino code (based on c/c++) and flash AS3. What I want to do is to be able to write a program with a voice control input.

So, program prompts user to spell a word. The user spells out the word. The program recognizes if this is right, adds one to a score if it's correct, and corrects the user if it's wrong. So I'm seeing a big list of words, each with an audio file of the word being read out, with the voice recognition part checking to see if the reply matches the input.

Ideally i'd like to be able to interface this with an Arduino microcontroller so that a physical output with a motor could be achieved in reaction also.

Thing is i'm not sure if I can make this program in flash, in Processing (associated with arduino) or if I need another C program-making-program. I guess I need to download a good voice recognizing program, but how can I interface this with anything else? Also, I'm on a mac. (not sure if this makes a difference)

I apologize for my cluelessness, any hints would be great!

-Susan

Answer 1

What you need is most likely not a speech recognition program. You are looking for a speech recognition library. You're probably not that familiar with programming yet, so the term may be unfamiliar. Basically, a library is an intermediate step between source code and a whole program.

In your case, you are really asking for a library that (1) does vocie recognition and (2) works with Adobe Flash. Unfortunately, I can't find one of them with Google. Furthermore, I've found people who've tried, and their experiments (while short of what you need) are described by others as impressive. That suggests the technology isn't there yet.

It is probably easier to move the voice recognition to the Arduino. "Voice recognition Arduino" provides a lot of good hits in Google.