  Natural language is an effective tool for communication, as information can
be expressed in different ways and at different levels of complexity. Verbal
commands, utilized for instructing robot tasks, can therefor replace
traditional robot programming techniques, and provide a more expressive means
to assign actions and enable collaboration. However, the challenge of utilizing
speech for robot programming is how actions and targets can be grounded to
physical entities in the world. In addition, to be time-efficient, a balance
needs to be found between fine- and course-grained commands and natural
language phrases. In this work we provide a framework for instructing tasks to
robots by verbal commands. The framework includes functionalities for single
commands to actions and targets, as well as longer-term sequences of actions,
thereby providing a hierarchical structure to the robot tasks. Experimental
evaluation demonstrates the functionalities of the framework by human
collaboration with a robot in different tasks, with different levels of
complexity. The tools are provided open-source at
https://petim44.github.io/voice-jogger/
