This system is comprised of many different components.  It's almost impossible to succinctly describe all the components in one project.  Therefore, I will concentrate on the Integron and Recognizer components in this project, but I will establish separate projects to describe the sub-components.

Here are pictures of the current state of the Integron.

A single unit consists of Raspberry Pi with a microphone and speakers, not too surprising.

i have several of these units, and some use BeagleBone Black instead of RPi.  I'm leaning that way for standardization.

Some of these units are connected to lights of this type, used as an annunciator:

I chose this light because I wanted something I liked to look at.  The point is that these are continuously visible, so I thought they should be pleasant to look at.  This is a 120VAC light so it just has a relay and is a binary on/off kind of signal for "there is something to pay attention to".  (It did have a second level available, by blinking.  Annoying, so stopped that.)  This worked well in the initial stages of the system.  Eventually though, I wanted just a little bit more granularity on understanding from the light, so I cobbled up some units with this light:

This is a $5 LED color orb.  What is great about it is that it in order to change the battery, you unscrew the bottom and there is direct access to three LEDs, red, green, and blue.  It was easy to remove the battery, bypass the control board, and just power the LEDs directly from RPi.  With this, I could add color to the signal.  As a test, I had one Processor scrape Yahoo finance for the state of the Dow Jones and just made it glow red if it was down, and green if up.  It is part of the Integron because it interacts with me by being seen.  This was much cheaper than the other light, so I was able to make several.  And they are not unpleasant to look at (if they are not blinking).

I kind of liked the pyramid, though, so I thought about replacing the light source of that light with the LED base from the other.

In some of my units I tied a few PIR sensors in for coarse gesture recognition.  Additionally, some units have an Atmel ATMega328P tied to a Hope RF transceiver to integrate with many small embedded wireless nodes that I have.  

I've tried many configurations and I think I finally have a good complement for a standardized unit.  I will make a custom indicator light that has speech recognition and coarse gesture recognition built in.  A small screen will add a little more specificity to the unit, so that if I am close to it, I can check with text, what the light means.  If I am not close, the light acts as an indicator that I transit visually in the general course of my life.  No need to constantly check the smartphone, this is meant to present to me that which I deem important to me, in an ambient way.

This post was just about the integron unit.  Currently, there are many Reactrons that are on the executing-an-action side of things.  I will post about those separately.