It has always been a personal dream of mine to be able to talk to my lab equipment. I would particularly like voice controlled pipettes. I would say “Pipette, dispense 12.3 microliters please” and it would say “voice command not recognized, purging pipette,” and then I would scream. Ahhh the dream.
Now behold the Respeaker by seeedstudio for just $70. It’s a open source software and hardware solution for voice control. You can program anything that you can connect to either its wifi module or its Arudino compatible microprocessor. Which means you can’t really hook it up to a pipette, but you could voice control plenty of other things.