I tend to use headphones quite a lot, because of this, I usually can't hear when my parents want something and call out my name. I am also usually in my room, which is a decent distance from the main living area of the house. I have this plan, and I just want to confirm whether it's plausible or not. My idea was to get an ESP8266, connect a small microphone to it, place it in the living area, then run that audio through some sort of speech recognition service (maybe google cloud). Then, once that service recognises my name, it would send that back, and I would get a notification on my computer. My initial idea was to just use my computer microphone, but the sound level was too low, and the noise too high once I turned up the gain.
Anyway, so I just wanted to ask whether this was possible. I can see two ways of doing this. One, getting the ESP to directly send the audio to a Google server then once a response has been received, alert my computer. Or, two, send the raw audio data directly to my computer, then have all the programming and stuff on my computer.
I'm asking because I have no previous experience with an ESP8266. (I picked that chip because it has network connectivity, and it is dirt cheap). Is it even possible to use this in such a way? Is it even possible to send audio like that to my computer? I personally like option number two, because the ESP programming seems really straightforward, (and also it's a lot easier to find support for programming on a computer)
Also, how do you program an ESP8266? Is it possible for me to just use the Arduino IDE or no? If not, I would probably prefer option two as well, since it's easier for me to use a programming language I'm comfortable with.
Looking back on this, it seems like a pretty stupid solution, but meh, I just wanna have some fun, and with the school holidays coming up next week this should keep me occupied for a while at least