I have been looking for ways to get the arduino to respond to speech and so far haven't seen much out there.
Anyone here that can help out? I would like to Si-Fi my house up a bit with voice activated lighting.
How hard did you look?
Googling "speech recognition arduino" gave me this first link:
http://www.societyofrobots.com/member_tutorials/node/346
I am not saying that it will necessarily work for you, but you need to try a little harder with your research - really, the Arduino is going to be limited for speech recognition tasks anyhow; its going to need some help in the form of an external chipset or hardware (and if you want something more than simple and basic commands of 1-2 seconds long - you are going to need a PC in there, somewhere, minimum - plus a lot of work coding - just to ultimately get something that does the equivalent of flipping a switch).
I have the same speech response issues with my cat Runt. That being said, if you can shout "Clap! Clap!" really loud, I think I've got a simple solution to controlling the lights.
Parallax has a -Say It Module- with voice recognition functionality and GUI software, it is made for Basic Stamp, but you can use the -Say It Module- serial protocol to interface with Arduino or other microcontroller.
I say skip the arduino all together
go to www.vcrib.com, download vcrib software, install it....
Get a X10, for 10 bucks for light switch get X10 receiver for 50 bucks.... that controls 4 lights for expansion.
Lookie 60 bucks, you have software intergration, and hardware for upto 4 lights plus voice recognition! :)
if ya need anything feel free to ask :) i'm in home automation :)