Vocal command may have considerable advantages in terms of usability in the AAL domain. However, efficient audio analysis in smart home environment is a challenging task in large part because of bad speech recognition results in the case of elderly people. Dedicated speech corpora were recorded and employed to adapted generic speech recog-nizers to this type of population. Evaluation results of a first experiment allowed to draw conclusions about the distress call detection. A second experiments involved participants who played fall scenarios in a realistic smart home, 67% of the distress calls were detected online. These results show the difficulty of the task and serve as basis to discuss the stakes and the challenges of this promising technology for AAL.