VeRO: Smart home assistant for blind with voice recognition

Abstract

Abstract In daily life, people with visual impairment have difficulty in their activities, especially at home activities. People with visual impairment as of 2017 reached 1.5 percent or around 3.75 million people from the population of Indonesia and more than 253 million people worldwide. The number of blind people who are not small need help to get a good quality of life and independent. Friendly home design for the blind is not yet available specifically. It is a particular difficulty for blind people to access the latest electronic goods or information (news). Then this becomes the basis of this research on how to provide easy access for blind people. This research provides a solution that is designing a prototype of a house that is visually impaired in addition to the use of electronic equipment. This system starts from the microphone as a sensor in charge of picking up sound and then the results are processed by Android and then connected to NodeMCU via Wi-Fi. The microphone used is the default microphone of the Android smart phone. By using the speech recognition method, the command is enough to say the keywords, Android will manage the sound into a code that will be sent to the microcontroller to perform the task. There are several categories of commands that can be handled, including (a) Turning on / off electronic devices, (b) Providing news information from popular news web portals, (c) Entertainment by playing streaming radio and (d) General information on hours and dates. All planned functions are running properly, there are some features that might be developed further. Adding sensitivity to starting voice commands and adding the ability to read long stories can be further research.