A smart home is a residence in which technology has been applied to expect and respond to the occupant's needs and commands, which can be used to enhance the everyday life at home. The main objective of this paper is to design an embedded system to detect and recognize human voice commands, which is in turn used to toggle respective loads. The entire design is accomplished using a speech recognition system along with an 8051 microcontroller kit and relays. The system is initially in standby mode waiting for an input from the user. Once an input is detected, it is analyzed by the speech recognition module. If a known command is detected, the speech recognition system sends respective digital representations to the microcontroller. The microcontroller then interprets these data signals, compares them with a database and thus identifies the referred load and its desired state. The processing results are then displayed on the LCD which is primarily used to display the system states. According to the load state identified, control signals are sent to respective relay circuits, thus actuating the appropriate loads. The original goals are the same i.e., to control the electrical appliances using voice commands and they have been achieved. © 2006-2014 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN).