While trying with the Google AIY voice kit, I developed a math drill game. A nice try, but the result is not as smooth as what I expected.

Source code is in repository: https://github.com/righthandabacus/pydrill

# Math drill game using speech recognition

This is a Python app using Tkinter and SpeechRecognition modules. It can run on Raspberry Pi (if you specify the correct microphone device) or other machine with a microphone.

The drill game shows a single digit multiplication and wait for uttered answer (within 10 seconds). Then the answer will be checked and the number of correct/wrong answer will be tallied. The voice recognition is using the speech_recognition module, which in turn, passed on to Google speech recognition service.

## User experience

The performance is not as smooth as expected to be a “game”. Two reasons for that: It doesn’t seem to be a way to capture audio and do recognition simultaneously. Also, Google voice recognition is not instantaneous but with some processing and network delay. These two added up, the user will see noticible delay between calling out the answer and the answer being checked.

## Quality of voice recognition

The speech recognition module provides multiple ways to recognize. I tried out the PocketSphinx and Google service. There are noticible difference between the two: Firstly, PocketSphinx has way lower accuracy than Google’s voice recognition service, even after providing a dictionary with weight and so forth. Secondly, the result from PocketSphinx is in spelled English words for numbers, e.g., “forty two” while Google gives you numerials, “42”. Even PocketSphinx is offline, it doesn’t seem to be any faster than Google.