Voice Driven Calculator (Source Code Included)

Amazon Looking like a simple calculator, this calculator is actually voice driven, written in Visual Basic. I am not even sure if 'voice driven calculator' is the appropriate term for it.

I see all kinds of terms like voice calculator, voice driven calculator, hands free calculator, voice activated calculator, voice controlled calculator, voice command calculator,..., and I think 'voice driven' sounds better than any of them.

You use it by speaking commands into your microphone. For example you speak 'Five times three' to get '15' as the result on the screen of the calculator program.

I use Microsoft Speech API to recognize the commands given by the speaker. The API can accurately recognize the commands, but the high accuracy is mostly due to the simplicity of the commands.

If the commands were more complicated or a lot more then the accuracy would greatly drop.

I am aware that many people use calculator to verify the balance of their bank statements and bills, but it's easy to input incorrect numbers by mistake and one mistake throws the whole thing off. Therefore I thought of writing a voice driven calculator to do that for us, but as everybody knows, the accuracy rate of today's best voice or speech recognition system is not 100%, and probably never will be.

Lucky enough for us, the dialect for using a calculator is very limited and with some finesse I can get it to work very well. Right now the accuracy rate is about 99% for me, but different voices/accents yield different results. I am investigating a way to provide training so that the program can easily adjust to different voices and intonations. Here is a screen shot:



Well, that doesn't look so good does it? I modified it a little so that it has these cool sliding forms on which you can configure the calculator's skin colors. Here it is:





Yeah.. it looks like the battleship in Star War but I've been stuck with this program for a long time and it's time to move on the way I move on with the rest of my life.

Here's the entire source code. Use at your own risks.
Source Code for Voice Driven Calculator in Visual Basic