Embedded Speech Recognition in UPnP (DLNA) Environment

In the past decade great technological advances have been made in internet services, personal computers, telecommunications, media and entertainment. Many of these advances have benefited from sharing technologies across those industries. This influences how Digital Home Entertainment products are designed to follow the overall ”Media Convergence” trend. Existing Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) or DLNA specifications are often used for these purposes. These specifications permit electronic devices to be simply plugged into home and local networks for access and exchange of shared data like music, video or photos. The number of media items in a user library can then easily exceed 10,000 elements. In addition, these specifications are used by manufacturers of consumer electronics to ensure interoperability of different consumer electronic devices. In this paper, we describe our efforts towards introducing speech recognition to control electronic devices in UPnP (DLNA) environments. We give an overview of the content structure and media information available in the UPnP (DLNA) network. We also analyze the use of available information for speech recognition. The main focus will be on the possibility of designing and implementing a voice-enabled UPnP (DLNA) Control Point, and the introduction of one particular solution.