Speech recognition has been a holy grail of robotics for a very long time. Developers have had to wait impatiently for decades as computer processor technology caught up with the resources such a feature demands. Software also had many years of evolution to go through before it was robust enough to raise the accuracy to a level of acceptability.

Anyone who has recently called into a large company and talked to an automated attendant knows that the technology is here. Even as much as we may despise talking to automated attendant on the phone we sure do want to make our robots listen to us! What many people don't know yet is just how easy it is to add to a robotics project. Trossen Robotics has created an extremely easy to use component for developers based upon the Microsoft speech recognition engine. By creating a simple command word tree in XML and using our wrapper you can have any robot or program you like (in windows) responding to your voice commands.

"How about now?"