This article presents an experiment with seniors and people with visual impairment in a voice-controlled smart home using the SWEET-HOME system. The experiment shows some weaknesses in automatic speech recognition that must be addressed, as well as the need for better adaptation to the user and the environment. Users were disturbed by the rigid structure of the grammar and were eager to adapt it to their own preferences. Surprisingly, while no humanoid aspect was introduced in the system, the senior participants were inclined to embody the system. Despite these aspects to improve, the system has been favorably assessed as diminishing most participant fears related to the loss of autonomy. . 2015. Evaluation of a context-aware voice interface for Ambient Assisted Living: qualitative user study vs. quantitative system evaluation.

Abstract-The SWEET-HOME project aims at providing audio-based interaction technology that lets the user have full control over her home environment, at detecting distress situations and at easing the social inclusion of the elderly and frail population. This paper presents an overview of the project focusing on the multimodal sound corpus acquisition and labelling and on the investigated techniques for speech and sound recognition. The user study and the recognition performances show the interest of this audio technology.

No abstract