Speech Comparison/Recognition

[RPGillespie]

This may seem like bit of an odd question, but I recently had this entertaining idea. I thought to myself, after reading the final Harry Potter book, that it might be neat to create a (Harry Potter-esque) game (or simply a game prototype in my case) that employs a microphone to control spell casting. In my mind, it didn't seem like too difficult a concept, seeing how Vista has a vast network of speech recognition software (I have windows XP, however).

Would this be possible easy somewhat feasible with the resources of a teenager? I was thinking either converting the inputted speech to words and doing string comparisons, but then I thought it would be much more efficient to compare it to a pre-recorded version of the spell. Any ideas?

RPGillespie

[mirex]

I would say that there should be a free c++ library with API for voice recognition somewhere on the internet.
After converting the input from microphone to words I would compare it with the spell strings with some function that can tell you distance of two strings ( http://www.cut-the-knot.org/do_you_know/Strings.shtml ) as  microphone input and voice recognition won't be perfect.

But I think that it will not work well anyhow and number of successfull casts will be low. Voice recognition is still inperfect and users usually have their microphones placed on various places and not set up correctly which degrades voice quality.