Anyone who got the chance to visit the Audeme stand at the Maker Faire Bay Area exhibition in California back in May will be interested to hear that their MOVI (My Own Voice Interface) Arduino voice recognition control shield it is due for funding launch on Kickstarter today. The shield is the brain child of the company’s two cofounders, Gerald Friedland and Bertrand Irissou.

Technical details of the system are a little sketchy and the company lists the board’s features as:

• Single board off-line speech recognizer and voice synthesizer
• Powerful yet simple programming interface.
• Can recognize several hundreds of user defined sentences
• "No Cloud Required" - does not require an internet connection or an auxiliary PC. Privacy friendly.
• Very low power ( < 3 Watt ) allowing for battery operation



The Arduino itself is not powerful enough to perform voice recognition so the shield contains an ARM processor running at 1 GHz. It communicates with the Arduino via a serial communication link. The voice recognition process is speaker independent so doesn’t require a period of training. For more information visit the Audeme site.