Over at Makezine.com, Neil Davenport has used a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino and some other basic circuitry to build a speech interpreter that controls devices around the home. He uses the set-up with some off-the-shelf devices such as lights, and even a Roomba vacuum cleaner, and controls them by having the Pi interpret his voice commands using a piece of software called PocketSphinx. It’s a really great example of what you can do with a bit of hacking. Read how to do it yourself here.