It can bring the product to life in combination with speech synthesis by allowing the product to not only talk, but also to listen and then respond intelligently. Several companies in the toy industry have tried to add voice recognition, but most of those products failed either because they cost too much or the recognition was unacceptably inaccurate. There are several types of voice recognition, including continuous speech recognition, used for dictation, and discrete word recognition, used for command and control. Continuous speech recognition requires powerful PC-level processors, but discrete word recognizers can operate with much less processing power, making it the technology of choice for the toy industry. Speaker-independent recognition works right out of the box without any training, but it is more difficult and expensive to do.
Users represent the most challenging aspect of voice-recognition technologies.
They have seen plenty of science-fiction movies and shows where actors walk into a room and start a natural dialog with a computer. This is simply not reality, not even with the most sophisticated, highest-cost systems available today. The fact is that there is no computer that can comprehend and act upon speech input like the human mind. Equally, there is neither a computer nor other technology that can actively select what noise or information it chooses to listen to while disregarding other sounds or conversation in the room. A goal of the product specification of smart toys must be to create a user interface that is as natural as possible, while taking into account what the voice-recognition technology can do.