GENIO: an ambient intelligence application in home automation and entertainment environment

Abstract

As one of the main aims of "Ambient Intelligence" is natural human interaction with the environment and one the most suitable is the home environment. Fagor has been working several years to develop a power-line network where all its household appliances, security sensors and actuators, heating systems and antiintrusion systems are connected and managed by a central controller named Maior-Domo. As a result of GENIO project, the user can dialog with his home and asks the services and functionalities he wants by talking as he was talking to a friend. The controller Maior-Domo has a human representation that the user can see and can interact with. When the user talks the Maior-Domo extracts the different commands from those vocal orders and controls the home devices. These orders are not specific commands that the user has to learn but natural speaking language without any need of learning. In the same way, any event or information from any device of the network is transmitted to the user by voice. In order to achieve a demonstrator of this Ambient Intelligence application, a real kitchen and sitting room have been built where the users can command the home talking naturally (in Spanish). Possible actions are: reading e-mails, programming the washing machine, checking the goods in the fridge, creating the shopping list, doing shopping with a PDA in the supermarket, activating the dishwasher, being guided on how to prepare a recipe for the oven checking if there are the needed goods to do it, listening some music stored at home, watching some photos, watching some selected video and so on. Every user has a wireless microphone in his/her shirt's pocket. This microphone captures his/her voice and all the sounds around him/her and sends them to a developed board which filters the voice frequency range from other sounds. From here the voice recognition system "understands" the pronounced sentence and process it. A quite extended number of sentences, called grammar, make up the possible dialogue between the person and the whole system. The user can address the whole system in different ways using a lot of expressions, talking naturally and spontaneously and dialoguing to the home. The defined grammar is so extended that almost the total speaker independence has been achieved.