Simple wearable projects with your Android phone
Tech on Tap
© Lead Image © Andrey Simonenko, 123RF.com
Create some interesting wearable projects with an Android device, an armband case, headphones, and MIT's free App Inventor package.
A wearable solution with voice recognition and speech-to-text capabilities can be used by anyone who needs information while their hands are busy or when they can't take their eyes away from their current task. Some examples include recipes for chefs, instruction manuals for mechanics, or directions for a cyclist.
In this article, I create an Android application that recognizes a spoken keyword that is searched in a text file; text-to-speech software echoes the result of the search. To create the Android app, I use MIT's App Inventor package, a free web-based Android app development tool you can use to create applications in a graphical environment.
For this project, you need a smartphone armband case and a set of headphones with a built-in microphone (Figure 1), as well as a Google user account [1] and a desktop or laptop computer to use App Inventor.
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