International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 888)

Volume 48– No.17, June 2012

Controlling Home Appliances Remotely through Voice

Command

Faisal Baig Saira Beg Muhammad Fahad Khan

Electrical Department Computer Science Department Computer Science Department
Federal Urdu University of Arts, COMSATS Institute of Federal Urdu University of Arts,
Science and Technology Information Technology Science and Technology
Islamabad, Pakistan Islamabad, Pakistan Islamabad, Pakistan

ABSTRACT the electronic devices used to control are easily available

Controlling appliances is a main part of automation. The main making it a cost effective solution.
object of Home automation is to provide a wireless The technology used to develop the system is Java for mobile
communication link of home appliances to the remote user. and MPLAB for microchip family of controller, and
The main objective of this work is to make such a system Bluetooth interface for wireless communication between
which controls the home appliances remotely. This paper home mobile and hardware control module.
discusses two methods of controlling home appliances one is
via voice to text SMS and other is to use the mobile as a 2. RELATED WORK
remote control, this system will provide a benefit to the [1] is about controlling home appliances through a
elderly and disable people and also to those who are unaware microcomputer, author discusses two different approaches to
of typing an SMS. control the home appliances; approaches are timer option and
voice command. The timer option provides control based on
General Terms timer, and the voice command provide control by using voice
GSM technology, Home Automation System. commands to control the appliances. This system uses a PC
and PC parallel port to control the appliances, and the
Keywords software interface is developed on the VB 6.0. This is used to
GSM, SMS, Home Automation and Voice command. convert voice command in to text and provide the operation to
control and monitor the appliances.
1. INTRODUCTION
Home automation is not a new concept in today‟s world, it is [2] Proposed a system that control home appliances through
used to provide convenience for user to remotely control and infra-red remote controller and power line communication by
monitor the appliances and it provides a better use of developing a home based server, this system help user to
electricity. The efficient use of electricity makes the HOME check the status of their appliances form anywhere through
automation to play an important role in daily life. As by the the cellular network and internet.
growth of PC (personal computers), internet, mobile phone
and wireless technology makes it easy for a user to remotely [3] Proposed a GSM based system for controlling the
access and controls the appliances. A lot of research has been Appliances for the people who are not at home, this is done
done and many solutions have been proposed to remotely remotely through SMS over GSM network using AT
access the HOME appliances. Some of them used internet, commands and on receiver the GSM modem is interfaced
wireless technology to communicate and control home with the PC, the home appliances control system is developed
appliances, others used Bluetooth and GSM technology for on the PC to monitor and control. In the proposed solution
controlling the home appliances. they use PC parallel port which is further interfaced with the
rely circuit to provide control over the appliances. This system
Proposed method reduces the wiring and complexity of the also provides a feedback by simply SMS to user which also
system. It has no geographical limitation and can be used on helps when there is any security breech in the home.
any GSM network; it provides portability to the system. It is
mainly focused on the elderly people, disables and for the [4] Proposed a solution of home appliances control using
people who are unable to type text or face difficulties in Bluetooth based remote control to access the control of home
typing. For the disable people, it is quite difficult to operate appliances within home, author developed a remote control
the HOME appliances physically or they are unable or feel with a Keypad which is interface to a microcontroller and this
uncomfortable to type a text so as to switch on/off the relative is interfaced to Bluetooth module to provide wireless interface
device as in [1] [7] [9]. So a system has been developed to for the remote to communicate with the appliances control
monitor the Appliances remotely by simply running the module. When the key is pressed the controller send the
mobile application and giving voice command. The mobile command regarding the pressed key via Bluetooth medium
application efficiently converts the voice command to text and and on the receiver end receiver receive the command and
transfers it to the GSM network. It is affordable to everyone, apply the corresponding action.
cheap and easy to install. As there is no wired communication [5] The Author Proposed a system that uses a PC based
between the remote user and appliances control module and application to convert voice command to txt and transmit this
command via a user mobile to the cellular network, on the

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 888)
Volume 48– No.17, June 2012

receiver the mobile receive the SMS which is read by the 3.1 Hardware Design
microcontroller using AT command structure, the On the receiver end it consist of a mobile which is
communication medium between the microcontroller and programmed with an application software, which is used to
mobile is RS232 standard which is a wired communication. transfer the receive SMS via a Bluetooth channel to the
After complete reception of the command the controller controller of microchip family PIC16F877A. It is a 8bit
perform the action. processor, the Controller receive the SMS by communicating
[7] the Author present a system in which the client system is with the Bluetooth module for the reception of the SMS, the
programmed with an application which is used to control and communication between the PIC16F877A and Bluetooth
monitor the appliances, the application that is developed for module is of RS232 standard. Fig. 2 shows the PIC16F877A
the client system is convert the given voice command to the development kit. After the complete reception of the
symbolic data that is to be transferred via WI-FI network to command the controller applies the given action by sending
the server computer. The server computer contains the Speech pulse to the switching circuit, after this the microcontroller
recognition application developed in Microsoft Visual checks the status of the appliances and send a feedback to the
Basic.net. so as the communication establish between the user.
client system and the server it start the speech recognition and
when the given data is received this is transfer to the control
circuit via PC parallel port and the given load is switched on.

3. PROPOSED METHOD
The aim of this research is to propose a model for home
appliances control, the system is shown in Figure 1.

Fig 2: PIC16F877A Development Kit

The switching circuit used to ON and OFF the appliances
which consist of optical triggered MOC3021 and connected
Fig 1: proposed system Architecture with the PIC16F877A pin. This is used to isolate the load
form the controller circuit to prevent any damage cause by the
The diagram in fig.1 shows a model from where user with an Load. TRIAC IC BTA 116 is used to drive the load which is
android OS based Mobile giving voice command, the mobile triggered by the gate current.
application convert the voice into text using android intent
API 2.01. Conversion of voice into text SMS step undergoes Fig.3 shows the proposed algorithm for hardware. At start the
many other steps such as; hardware initialize and the microcontroller checks for the
availability of the Bluetooth device, after this it communicate
 After taking voice command, convert it into with the mobile which is the master device with app enabled
ByteOutputStream. which receive the voice commands after this it transfer these
command to the microcontroller via Bluetooth media which is
 Than convert ByteOutputStream into unsigned
the heart of this work. After the successful transmission of the
integer array. And add 255 into all those values
commands the controller performs the given operation. And
which lie between 0-31 ranges.
checks for the proper operation of command, on successful
The commands generated are appended in SMS payload operation it will acknowledge the master device that the
which is sent through GSM network. Table 1 shows the basic operation has performed.
commands which then translate into SMS commands.
Table 1. Voice Command and its related SMS Command
Voice Command to Text Command Attributes
Voice Commands SMS Commands
Main Switch On ’ SON1E’
Main Switch OFF ‘SOFF1E ’
Light On ‘ LON1E ‘
Light Off ‘ LOFF1E ‘
Fan On ‘ FON1E ‘
Fan Off ‘ FOFF1E‘

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 888)
Volume 48– No.17, June 2012

at the user end and read by the micro controller via Bluetooth
module. After the complete reception the concern operation is
performed after this the micro controller save the status of the
device and sends a feedback on the successfulness or the
failure of the concerned operation. Similarly a user can switch
off the Light by speaking Light off and the android OS based
Mobile application convert the voice in to the „LOFF1E‟ text
and append it to the SMS payload and the similar process
repeats.

Fig 3: Flow chart of Proposed Hardware System Fig 4: Voice Command tests for supply and light
4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 5. CONCLUSION
The proposed system converts the voice commands in to text The communication link between the appliances and remote
and sends to the Home mobile via standard GSM SMS user plays an impotent roll in automation. In this study we
architecture; in the given system we test a light, fan and a proposed a system that control electric appliance via voice
main switch or main supply as shown in figure 4. when the user is in remote area, and also it controls the
Table 2: Voice commands and SMS commands with appliances through home mobile.
Acknowledgement
6. REFERENCES
[1] S. M. Anamul Haque, S. M. Kamruzzaman and Md.
Voice Command to Text Command Attributes
Ashraful Islam1 “A System for Smart-Home Control of
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Commands Commands Acknowledgement Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on
Electrical Engineering & 2nd Annual Paper Meet 26-28 ,
Success Failure pp. 128-131, January, 2006
Main Switch ‟ SON1E‟ ‟ SUPPLY ‟ SUPPLY [2] Tam Van Nguyen, Dong Gun Lee, Yong Ho Seol,
On 1 on‟ 1 on 0‟ Myung Hwan Yu, Deokjai Choi, “Ubiquitous Access to
Main Switch „ SOFF1E ‟ ‟ SUPPLY ‟ SUPPLY Home Appliance Control System using Infrared Ray and
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When the user speaks Light on the android OS based Mobile 23. 2004
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shows text against each voice command. When SMS received Control using Mobile through Spoken Commands”.

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Volume 48– No.17, June 2012

IEEE - International Consortium of Stem Cell Networks [8] Yoshiro Imai, Yukio Hori, Shin'ichi Masuda, "A Mobile
(ICSCN) 2007. 22-24,Pp.622-625, 2007 Phone-Enhanced Remote Surveillance System with
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