An expandable voice user interface as lab assistant based on an improved version of Google’s speech recognition

Voice assistants are potentially helpful when working in a scientific laboratory. A big challenge is the extremely specific use of language in every laboratory. As with any voice assistant, another concern is data security. Here, we present Rainbow—an open source voice user interface (VUI) for scientific laboratories, that is adaptable to any Windows PC with Internet access. We used Google Translate Site (GTS) as a voice input and output system to ensure communication to the user. The scripting language AutoIt controls GTS, executes all actions and builds the VUI. Rainbow performs tasks from three different areas—general Microsoft Windows tasks, lab-specific tasks, and device-specific tasks. We achieved significantly higher speech recognition accuracy with our VUI than with GTS alone (91.3% versus 85.1%). Because of Rainbow's architecture, it is possible to improve the voice assistant in terms of functionality and accuracy, allowing each laboratory to optimize its own Rainbow system in a user-friendly way. In a test setup, this led to a speech recognition accuracy of 98.6%. Taken together, Rainbow provides an opportunity for every scientist to implement highly specific scientific terms and tasks to this open source voice assistant system in a very user-friendly way.