Hello Anyone Who's Reading,
This project is not dead! On the contrary, I am currently working on a new rendition of my automation system, this time utilizing voice recognition. I began by experimenting with offline voice recognition; I leveraged the free PocketSphinx Speech-to-Text engine provided by CMU, but found that it was not sufficiently accurate or easy to train. I am now working on a system which uses offline recognition for simple tasks and for keyword recognition. The latter will trigger online speech recognition via wit.ai, a free cloud voice recognition service.

I hope to post more updates on my project soon.