Wouldn’t it be great if your computer had the ability to react to sounds? Sure, speech recognition is out there and it does a decent job. What I’m talking about is teaching a computer to hear.

I’d like my computer to be able to recognize sounds that it hears:a ringing phone, the microwave oven signaling its done cooking, a dog barking, glass breaking, the doorbell ringing. What if my computer could get smart about these things? There are a lot of household tools and appliances which aren’t “smart appliances,” those that share their status electrically. A computer taught to recognize these sounds could log them or even respond to them somehow. Then the everyday beeps of these “disconnected” appliances would be communicating to a computer, allowing for some imaginative possibilties for home automation and the like.

Imagine an iPod-sized box that could be loaded with samples of sounds and spit out a network packet whenever it recognizes one. Does this sound useful to anyone? Any other uses anyone can dream up?

The Hack-A-Day story on bullet trajectories reminded me of this idea. Imagine an iPod-sized box that could be loaded with samples of sounds and spit out a network packet whenever it recognizes one.I don’t know enough about sound processing or I’d start hacking it myself.