Implementation of a Voice-Controlled Home Automation System Using Raspberry Pi for Ebonyi Households

The adoption of smart home automation technologies in Nigeria remains limited due to high product costs and inadequate adaptation to local language and power infrastructure constraints. This study implements a voice-controlled home automation system using Raspberry Pi, designed with the affordability and electrical realities of Ebonyi State households in mind. The system enables users to control lights, fans, and door locks through spoken commands, with speech recognition handled by a locally hosted implementation of the CMU Sphinx engine to minimize dependence on cloud connectivity. Relay modules interfaced with the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins manage connected electrical appliances. The development methodology comprised hardware assembly, software configuration, and local corpus training to improve recognition accuracy for Nigerian-accented English. The system was installed and evaluated in two residential settings in Abakaliki over four weeks. Results indicate a voice command recognition accuracy of 91 percent under typical indoor acoustic conditions. Response latency averaged 1.2 seconds from command utterance to appliance actuation. System uptime was 98.6 percent across the evaluation period, including power interruption recovery via automatic restart scripting. User satisfaction scores averaged 4.4 out of 5. The study concludes that locally deployed voice automation systems offer viable smart home solutions for Nigerian households. Future work should explore Igbo language command integration and solar battery backup compatibility.