A valuable way to interact with your robot is to use voice commands. This method is useful when you have no other means of control (keyboard, joystick, or smart device), or you would like a more convenient method. This type of technology is critical for people with physical disabilities, and in the future, robots will be able to provide helpful functions for all mankind through the use of voice commands.
Today though, we can implement voice control over our ROS robot to enable any action or process you can control by any other method. These actions are typically navigating the robot or controlling an arm, but this list is virtually endless. With proper hardware, you could verbally command your robot to do the following:
Change the TV channel
Retrieve a beverage from the kitchen
Let the dog outside
Do whatever you can imagine. Currently, there are two primary speech recognition tools available in ROS: Sphinx and rospeex. These tools and their ROS interfaces...