Building Speech-Enabled Robot

[techmind48]

I am from India -- a hobbyist building electronic gadgets at home.

My recent interest in robotics led to build a 'Light Following Robot' without any microcontroller, and is working fine.

Now my next plan is to build a speaking robot - which can reproduce recorded sentences using speech ICs.

Many Speech ICs are available such as ISD 1420, 1500 series.

Speech can be recorded using mic and playback the speech using switches manually.

Attaching an external mic on the robot board and speaking in the mic should trigger the speech module automatically to reproduce the speech recorded instead of manually operating the playback switch.

As I am new to programming, can we design a circuit for triggering the playback switch on the speech module?


Any help from Robosavvy members?

A. S. Bhasker Raj
Hobbyist
India
email ID: bhasker.raj48@gmail.com

[limor]

you can also use a cheap mp3 decoder
<strike> http://robosavvy.com/store/product_info ... cts_id/492 </strike>

[ EDIT by moderator on July 27th 09: the above link is not currently active. The product may still be purchased from Robosavvy but has a 3 weeks delivery time ]

[Bullit]

A more complete solution with 1.5W amplifier
http://quadravox.com/frameset/qvframeset.htm
There's a botmag article on this module
http://botmag.com/articles/01-18-06_Make_Your_Robotova-1_Speak.shtml
These modules are easy to use because you need only send them a one byte index corresponding to that mp3 file in memory.
They are limited to 8 megabytes and I think 240 mp3 files.

[wthierry]

You could also make the electronics simple by enabling wireless network technology, and can offload a lot of processing to a laptop