One of the greatest challenges in Ambient Assisted Living is to design health smart homes that could be able to anticipate the needs of its inhabitant while maintaining their comfort and their safety with an adaptation of the house environment and a facilitation of the connections to the outside world. The most likely to benefit from these smart homes are people in loss of autonomy such as the disabled people or the elderly with cognitive deficiencies. But it becomes essential to ease the interactions with the smart home through dedicated interfaces, in particular, thanks to systems reactive to vocal orders. Audio recognition is also a promising way to ensure more safety by contributing to detection of distress situations. This paper presents the stakes and the challenges of this domain based on some experiments carried out concerning distress call recognition and sound classification at home.