Ralph,

I would suggest you try the following:

1.) Borrow or buy a high quality stage microphone and an AGC preamplifier module. Connect this into the 'line input' jack of the sound card ports of your PC

2.) Record a series of words from each of your family/friends, and save these words in .WAV format

3.) Goto http://www.captain.at/howto-fftw-spectrograph.php and try converting these signals into the frequency domain or download a ready-made program to do the same. Save the results (frequency coefficients) as simple ASCII numbers a text file.

4.) Write a short program to do a 'comparative analysis' on each word with respect to the relative voices/accents etc. Then use an optimised version of these results to write a fast LUT (Look up table) to be implemented in a HSM (High speed micro). Since your lookup table is probably going to be very large, use a fast micro with HUGE memory resources - maybe the F120 as Erik suggested might be a suitable candidate.

Good Luck!

VA