It is the first standalone speech recognizer and voice synthesizer for Arduino with full English sentence capability: • Up to 200 customizable English sentences. • Speaker independent ...

For more information on the new Arduino Speech Recognition standalone board jump over to the Kickstarter website for details and to make a pledge from $68 CAD. Source: Kickstarter.

An arduino is for ‘rapid prototyping’ in my opinion, ... the microcontroller I’ve chosen to use for various projects is the PICAXE, compared to this it’s practically standalone.