This is a review of the SR-07 Speech Recognition Kit

Yes, I know. It took us a bit to get this article started. Please
understand that there was much testing of this product to insure we
were on the right track and we are. I will be putting up the full
article in a few days with complete interfacing instructions to an
OOPIC and then to a bot. I will also include the source code to save
you some time.

First I would like to thank Images SI Inc. for sending us this unit to test and write up.

We are in a time of growing capabilities in our hobby robots
and the SR-07 is one of those products that will help us continue to
get ever more complex in our designs. Imagine telling your robot what
to do with simple one word commands… or a spoken command simply
causing an interrupt and sending your program down a separate path. If
those are the things you are looking for then this might be the product
for you.

At the center of the SR-07 you will find the HM2007 speech
recognition IC. The HM2007 is capable of recognizing up to forty .96
sec. words or up to twenty 1.92 sec. words. The words you program into
the unit via a mini twelve button keypad are stored on an 8K X 8 RAM IC
with an onboard battery to maintain it’s memory. In my testing I worked
in the 40 word mode and was able to achieve an accuracy rate of 99%
plus or minus a tad. One of the cool features, especially to a newer
member of our hobby, is that the SR-07 has a mode jumper on it that can
set the HM2007 in the Manual Mode or in CPU mode. Manual Mode is just
that, it is always listening and sending data, you have to program for
it which can eat valuable processor time. In the CPU Mode everything is
the same except the HM2007 will work on it’s own until it recognizes a
word and then send an interrupt to the controller for processing. I
chose to run in the Manual Mode for most of my testing but on a bot I
would definitely run in CPU Mode.

OK, so now you have bought the SR-07
and it has arrived, what do you do now. Well, if you bought a kit, read
the manual and assembly EXACTLY as shown. If you bought a complete
board, open the box, add a battery and play. I had absolutely no
knowledge of this product when it was mailed to Bots and Bytes other
than I knew something was in the mail. When it arrived I opened the
box, added a battery and within 10 minutes had the unit programmed with
twenty words. One other note for the average robot builder, read NO
further than the kit assembly instructions. The interface circuits
shown are old school relay or transistor driver circuits and you can
only use up to ten commands. I have passed on to Images SI Inc. my more
useful way of interfacing described below.

Alas, the SR-07 was not sent to me to play with and forget. I
had the task of figuring out how to make it work with an MCU and write
about it. I am still testing the accuracy running to an OOPIC and
should be done in a day or two. Here are a few teasers. Treat the
output to the display as two 4 bit ports, use one ports as tens (last
four pins) and one port as singles (first four pins right of GND and
Vcc). Simple OOPic code will look like this:

Dim Singles As New oDIO4
Dim Tens As New oDIO4
Dim Val As New Byte
Sub Main()
Singles.Nibble=0
Singles.Direction=cvInput
Tens.Nibble=1
Tens.Direction=CvInput
Val = Tens.Value * 10
Val = Val + Singles.Value
Do

‘Use IF Then or Select Case to use the 43 values the board will deliver.

Loop
End Sub

This is very close to my actual working code which will be up very soon. I will also have an interface picture for you to use.

My opinions on the SR-07:
1 – It is a gotta have.
2 – It needs screw holes drilled in it for mounting.
3 – It needs single row pin headers for easy interfacing to existing circuits.

Buy a SR-07