[FoRK] Cheap Electronics Dissection Project

[Kragen Javier Sitaker]

Dave Long writes:
> Just for completeness, from another Kragen thread:
> 
> > From John Canny's "The Future of Human-Computer Interaction" in the
> > July/August ACM Queue, some optimistic notes about current speech
> > recognition.  The URL is
> > http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?=20
> > name=3DContent&pa=3Dprinter_friendly&pid=3D402&page=3D1
> 
> even though VUIs don't seem relevant for a cheap device.

Assuming for the sake of argument that a voice user interface has the
same quality as a graphical or visible-text UI, VUIs are extremely
relevant for cheap devices: everywhere I've seen so far, an LCD big
enough to display more than a couple of words on costs $20, and you
can get eleven 70MHz 32-bit LPC2101 processors for that price.
There's good voice-recognition software that supposedly needs about
15MIPS (ViaVoice) to run in real-time, and you may not even need
real-time.  I don't know how much bandwidth to how much memory
speech-recognition needs, though.

Speech synthesis is even CPU-cheaper than speech recognition.

Audio I/O hardware (earphones, speakers, microphones, ADCs) is almost
free compared to graphical LCD panels.