A Smart Wand for all us Muggles

Arthur C. Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Even though we know that something isn’t “magic”, it’s nice to see how close we can get. [Dofl] and his friends, big fans of the magic in Harry Potter, thought the same thing, and decided to create a magic wand that they could use themselves.

The wand itself is 3D printed and has a microcontroller and WiFi board, a voice recognition board, a microphone, and a vibrating motor stuffed inside. The wand converts the voice into commands and since the wand is connected to WiFi, the commands …read more

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Siri opens “smart” lock to let neighbor walk into a locked house

“Thanks, Siri,” said the guy who spent thousands on smart lightbulbs, temperature-sensing thermostats and a Bluetooth-controlled door lock. Continue reading Siri opens “smart” lock to let neighbor walk into a locked house

Seeed Studio’s ReSpeaker Speaks All the Voice Recognition Languages

Seeed Studio recently launched its third Kickstarter campaign: ReSpeaker, an open hardware voice interface. After their previous Kickstarted IoT hardware, such as the RePhone, mostly focused on connectivity, the electronics manufacturer from Shenzhen now tackles another highly contested area of IoT: Voice recognition.

The ReSpeaker Core is a capable development board based on Mediatek’s MT7688 WiFi module and runs OpenWrt. Onboard is a WM8960 stereo audio codec with integrated 1W speaker/headphone driver, a microphone, an ATMega32U4 coprocessor, 12 addressable RGB LEDs and 8 touch sensors. There are also two expansion headers with GPIOs, I2S, I2C, analog audio and USB 2.0 …read more

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Talking Star Trek

Speech generation and recognition have come a long way. It wasn’t that long ago that we were in a breakfast place and endured 30 minutes of a teenaged girl screaming “CALL JUSTIN TAYLOR!” into her phone repeatedly, with no results. Now speech on phones is good enough you might never use the keyboard unless you want privacy. Every time we ask Google or Siri a question and get an answer it makes us feel like we are living in Star Trek.

[Smcameron] probably feels the same way. He’s been working on a Star Trek-inspired bridge simulator called “Space Nerds in …read more

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