I have fixed this now by running it in UART mode.  Device works really well and is very responsive.  Thanks for all the help.  I am looking forward to making the robot :-) 

Jenna,

Fantastic thank you I have tried the i2c code and it works very well. voice recognition is excellent.  The only issue I get is after a while of running it  I get

oserror: [errno 121] remote i/o error.  

I will check the pins are properly connected but as a back up do you know what the i2c bus speed should be set to I cannot find any documentation on this.

thanks

Jon

Any idea what I would base this libaby on.  To get me started? 

ThNks 

Jon