"Oh, I Say, Jeeves!" A Calm Approach to Smart Home Input

Now that we are in the era of Ubiquitous Computing, our input devices must evolve beyond the mainframe and PC paradigms of the last century. Previous studies have suggested establishing automatic speech recognition and other means of audio interaction for the control of embedded systems and mobile devices. One of the major challenges for this approach is the distinction between intentional and unintentional commands, especially in a noisy environment. We propose the Snark Circuit, based on the notion that a command received three times “must be true”. Eventually, overlapping systems will recognize three triggers when a user claps twice (giving signals of sound and motion) and speaks the name of her computer. 20 participants took part in a study designed to test two of these three inputs: the sound of a double-clap and a spoken name. Vocal command recognition was successful in 92.6% of our trials in which a double clap was successfully performed.