Developing a voice-controlled home-assisting system for KTH Live-in Labs

Abstract: The following master thesis is conducted on behalf of KTH Royal Instituteof Technology and KTH Live-in Lab with the purpose of developing avoice-controlled home-assisting system for the KTH Live-in Lab. The labis being designed to serve as a testbed for products and services that canbe tested and veried within an optimal space which can simulate a reallifeusage. Being designed as a bridge between industry and academia, itaims to create a greater ease to which new products are tested and are researchedwhile involving KTH students in the process. Having innovationat its core the KTH Live-in Lab needs a mode of communication betweenthe user/occupant and the appliances in the space. That is why this thesisproposes to design a voice-controlled system that can control the appliancesand execute the commands provided by the user. The system will be createdaround a Speech to text service and improving its performance through variousmodications/integrations. The solution will be installed in the KTHLive-in Lab and integrated with the central controller once the sensor placementand controller installation is done.To make the system more robust and accurate, a new variable called,\Failure Factors" were dened for a voice-controlled system. The prototypeswere designed and improved with these factors as a basis. The main aimof the project is to make a system capable of handling a set of pre-denedsimple commands. For testing purpose, only 3 appliances were considered {light, heater and music. Also, the output is observed on LEDs rather thanon real appliances for the testing. These limitations were adapted to keepour focus on the prime motive of this project and that was to make the voicerecognitionas consistent and accurate as possible. Future work will consist ofmaking the system capable of handling complex user commands and havingan active feedback mechanism such that the user can have conversation withthe system.