Voice control

ae

Voice control has just recently become interesting to me. Ikuko bought me an Amazon Echo and I’m surprised at how useful I find it. I’m also surprised at how well it works– it can decipher my commands even when I’m whispering or mumbling from across the room. But the usefulness is what surprised me the most. Siri, Cortana, and Google Now were never that compelling to me. Typing is pretty fast and discrete and I prefer that to shouting at my phone. What makes Amazon Echo nice is that it leaves my hands free. It’s always listening and when I’m in the kitchen I often have my hands full. So with no button pressing or fumbling with a device, I can speak instructions that are quickly parsed and executed.

That got me thinking about where it might be useful in rigging for difficult experiments. For example, when making patch clamp recordings under the guidance of two-photon microscopy (for example…), the operator has one hand on the 3-axis control for the imaging system and the other hand is on the 3- or 4- axis control for the pipette manipulator. So there’s no free hand for starting and stopping the imaging, recording the imaging, zooming in and out, etc. It could be handy to have voice control for those functions, and it probably wouldn’t be terribly hard to implement. There are open source packages for speech recognition like CMU Sphinx.

Thoughts?

* Of course, in my scenario, the operator also has a pipette in their mouth, so voice control isn’t always a viable option. But for much of the experimental process, there is a valve closed and the operator can speak, so it’d still be useful.

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