It’s happened dozens of times.

You’re lounging comfortably in your favorite recliner. Feet up, drink on your left, snacks on your right, but then you realize something’s missing.

There it is. Across the room you spot the television remote control. Imagine being able to stay in your spot and simply say, “Television turn on channel two.”

Veton Kepuska, an associate professor in Florida Tech’s electrical and computer engineering department, says he hopes the concept will be available to the public in the near future.

Kepuska, a speech scientist, has spent more than two decades researching and developing Wake-up-Word. The speech recognition technology allows virtually any device to respond to voice recognition through a trigger word. The difference between his product and ones currently on the market is Kepuska doesn’t require a button to be pushed in order to activate the voice recognition. The trigger word essentially replaces the button.

“When you want to speak to someone, you refer to that person by name,” Kepuska explains. “His or her name is the trigger word. You would assign a trigger word for anything from a tv, to a car, a phone, a computer, any kind of robot.”

Kepuska came to Florida Tech 10 years ago to continue his research and complete the project, taking speech recognition devices to the next level. He recently received a $50,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to help commercialize the product..

“Conventional speech recognition systems typically operate at their best within the range of 99 percent accuracy,” Kepuska says. “This implies that for the natural rate of human speech, or conversation, the person who utters 100 words per minute would be expected to have at least one error per minute. My research has shown that Wake-up-Word speech recognition will make one error per three hours.”