Toward a More Robust Home Automated System: Introducing a Voice Activation Technique via Pubnub

The work reported in this article developed a home automated system using voice activation. This is with a view to providing users complete control over electrical appliances using simple easy to remember voice commands on an Android mobile device. This work was implemented using the Atmega 328 microcontroller, Relays and a Wi-Fi shield. The human voice is first converted to text using a Natural language processing tool from the Android based application. Thereafter, the text is sent over the internet via the PubNub to the microcontroller. The Atmega 328 microcontroller was programmed on an Arduino using C programming language and the Android based application was developed using Android Software Development Kit. Results obtained from the testing show that the implemented system achieves the mean scores of 8, 7.6, and 7.2 for ease of use, learnability and effectiveness respectively justifying the fact that the system is capable of controlling appliances by changing their state (ON/OFF) from remote a location with a response time within the reasonable limit.