Home Service

The control of electronic and other devices around the home can be a challenge for older people and those with disabilities. Home Service is developing speech driven control to help people live independently in their homes.
Home Service involves a longitudinal study of ten elderly and physically disabled people using voice enabled assistive technology around the home. A demonstrator system consisting of a microphone and software running on a tablet device has been deployed in these homes and links back to speech recognition systems running on central servers.
The Home Service project is addressing the challenge of providing speech-driven control systems for older people and people with speech disorders. The robustness of these systems needs to be improved for a home environment in which there will be other noises (for instance from the TV) and a distant microphone. Speakers with disordered speech have more variable and irregular productions, and there is usually very limited training data for the speech recognition system. Each Home Service system is being adapted and tailored to its user's voice and the devices it is to control.