Really glad to see experimentation with telephony and professional voice analysis tools. Strong development work — you learned a lot, and had good fun.
This project could benefit from a better presentation in which you focused less on the underlying tech, and instead, more clearly introduced/explained the context/application, and clearly framed the speculative/conjectural aspect of the project. For example, a diagram showing the possible deployment. Let me be clear, this is a great quick project; I just think you owe it to yourself to control your “story” better.

RESPONSE FROM SOL: >>The majority of the story is outlined in my blog post, which I figured would be the primary point of contact for public discussion – http://golancourses.net/2010spring/03/02/project-3-the-secret-word-of-the-day/. Mostly I’m just frustrated because I spent a lot of time on the blog post, and was just too tired/flustered to go to my blog post at 9AM (not to mention having to prepare a live demo – I need to script that; not enough of my demos are “road-show ready”.) I should have just walked through the blog, with a brief demo, and a “it might look like this” diagram in the blog that I could go to on no sleep. And gotten more sleep. 🙂
>>On the other hand, I sort of intentionally didn’t treat this as a sponsor week/demo day sort of project, because I felt the technical landscape was really underexplored. That made me want to get away from today’s interactions a little. (For once I didn’t want to pander to a technology’s current strengths and what people thought they could do with it today – I wanted to take some time to bend it to my will and make people see it doing more with it next year than they ever imagined. That’s what school is for, right?)
-SB

Interesting project but I’m wondering if there are more advanced/interesting applications of the technology.

Would like to see something visual happen when the secret word is said. Maybe if you’re talking on a phone (like a payphone) it tosses confetti in the air.

I think one of the issues is the “Ahhhhhhh, I’ve heard you say…” I don’t think the software you’re using recognizes the word “Ahhhhhhh”, so maybe just change it to “Ah”. That may help.
It’s very impressive that you tackled voice recognition. I kind of wish there was something visually to give me a clue as to how this voice system works. Maybe either a video or something. It kind of reminds me of a security system (like maybe someone could use it to detect when a particular word was said).
For the time you had though, it’s pretty cool. 🙂 –Amanda