Following up to my primer on using Snowboy for custom Google Assistant wake words, in this video, I’ll walk you through using Snowboy’s “Hotword As A Service” to train your own wake words.
Raspberry Pi 3B+ (with appropriate SD card and power supply)
The Mego 2XL Robot is an interesting piece from the very beginning of interactive electronic toys. The 1970s 2XL incorporated little more than a modified 8-track player to provide hours of entertainment on specially-formatted cassette tapes. In this Mego 2XL teardown, we’ll look at how the toy was built, the basic working mechanism, and attempt to diagnose a 2XL not working.
RESOURCES:
2XL Documents (contains US Patent and component data sheets)
The new voice assistants like Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google (itself?) are becoming more and more ubiquitous as we race toward a “Star Trek”-style omnipresent computing interface, but what if you don’t like invoking the name of your chosen corporate overlord when you use the assistant’s features? What if you could speak “Okay, Computer” into an Apple mouse like Scotty did? In this video, I’ll show you how to set up a custom wake word with your voice assistant using a platform called “Snowboy”.
Raspberry Pi 3B+ (with appropriate SD card and power supply)
How To Set Up Google Assistant On The Matrix Creator Development Board
Install the Sox, PortAudio, and PyAudio dependencies
sudo apt-get install python-pyaudio python3-pyaudio sox
pip install pyaudio
Install Swig by compiling from source
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/swig/swig-3.0.10.tar.gz
tar -xvf swig-3.0.10.tar.gz
sudo apt-get install libpcre3 libpcre3-dev
cd swig-3.0.10
./configure --prefix=/usr\
--without-clisp \
--without-maximum-compile-warnings &&
make
make install &&
install -v -m755 -d /usr/share/doc/swig-3.0.10 &&
cp -v -R Doc/* /usr/share/doc/swig-3.0.10
Install the Atlas library
sudo apt-get install libatlas-base-dev
Verify audio recording and playback work
arecord -f cd -d 5 test.wav
aplay test.wav
Clone the Snowboy repo
https://github.com/Kitt-AI/snowboy.git
Compile the Snowboy Python wrapper
cd snowboy/swig/Python
make
Run the Snowboy demo with the “Snowboy” wake word
cd snowboy/src/examples/Python
python demo.py /home/pi/snowboy/resources/models/snowboy.umdl
Clone the GassistPi repo
git clone https://github.com/shivasiddharth/GassistPi
Install the AIY hat configuration
sudo chmod +x ./GassistPi/audio-drivers/AIY-HAT/scripts/configure-driver.sh
sudo ./GassistPi/audio-drivers/AIY-HAT/scripts/configure-driver.sh
sudo reboot
sudo chmod +x ./GassistPi/audio-drivers/AIY-HAT/scripts/install-alsa-config.sh
sudo ./GassistPi/audio-drivers/AIY-HAT/scripts/install-alsa-config.sh
Confirm that your audio still works
speaker-test -t wav
From here, you’re going to use the credentials as well as the project and device IDs created when you first set up the Google AIY kit. Refer to the how-tos above if you haven’t gotten this far yet.
Run the installer script (this will take a while)
sudo chmod +x ./GassistPi/scripts/gassist-installer.sh
sudo ./GassistPi/scripts/gassist-installer.sh
As the script finishes, you will be presented with a unique URL for authentication. Copy that URL into a browser, sign in to Google, copy the authentication code, and paste that at the prompt in the terminal.
You can now run Google Assistant via GassistPi which allows intricate customization options as well as custom wake words via Snowboy. Configure these options by using a text editor with ~/GassistPi/src/config.yaml
Run Google Assistant with the following command:
/home/${USER}/env/bin/python -u /home/${USER}/GassistPi/src/main.py --project_id [your project ID] --device_model_id [your device ID]
The Matrix Creator is an IoT-centric development board that comes with a wide array of goodies that facilitate hardware development such as an FPGA, various accelerometer and environmental sensors, IR transceivers, and even an 8-microphone array that can be used for echolocation as well as omnidirectional listening. It’s this microphone array that makes the Matrix Creator (and it’s smaller sibling, the Matrix Voice) an ideal platform for developing your own AI assistant! In this video, we’ll look at installing and setting up Google Assistant and see how it compares to the dedicated AIY hat from a previous video.
Raspberry Pi 3B+ (with appropriate SD card and power supply)
Add the repository key
wget https://apt.matrix.one/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://apt.matrix.one/raspbian $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/matrixlabs.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Install the packages
sudo apt install matrixio-creator-init
Reboot and install the kernel modules
sudo apt install matrixio-kernel-modules
Reboot and install the Google Assistant SDK per their instructions:
Now, you could run the Google Assistant at this point and everything will work just fine, but the fine folks at Matrix Labs actually put together a nice little application that adds color-changing lights and other little niceties to the stock Assistant installation
Clone the Matrix Google Assistant repo
git clone https://github.com/matrix-io/google-assistant-matrixio.git
Then run the program using the project and model IDs from the SDK setup
~/google-assistant-matrixio/google-matrixio-assistant-hotword --project_id [your-dev-project-id] --device_model_id [your-model-id]
Assistant will run and respond to the standard “OK, Google” or “Hey, Google” hotwords.
AI voice assistants are the latest new hotness to come out of Silicon Valley, but before they were in every electronics department, they were much the exclusive playground of the DIY tinkerer. With kits like Google’s AIY line, hackers and makers can build their own voice assistants with little more than the good ol’ Raspberry Pi! In this video, I’ll walk you through how to set up the Google AIY Voice kit on a Raspberry Pi and run one of the demo python scripts to start building your own voice interfaces!
PARTS/TOOLS:
Raspberry Pi 3B+ (with appropriate SD card and power supply)
RESOURCES:
AIY Custom Raspbian http://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/
Google Developer Console http://console.developers.google.com
If you’re having trouble with segmentation faults crashing the Python demos, invoke these commands as Pi to install the earlier Google Assistant Library Python modules:
pip3 install google-assistant-library==1.0.0
pip3 install google-assistant-library
If you’re receiving the following error message
File "/home/pi/AIY-projects-python/src/aiy/assistant/auth_helpers.py", line 75, in _credentials_flow_interactive
webbrowser.register('chromium-browser', None, webbrowser.Chrome('chromium-browser'), -1)
TypeError: register() takes from 2 to 3 positional arguments but 4 were given
Then change line 75 in /home/pi/AIY-projects-python/src/aiy/assistant/auth_helpers.pyto the following:
webbrowser.register('chromium-browser', None, webbrowser.Chrome('chromium-browser'), preferred=True)
Be sure to keep the indentation and spacing the same as the original as it the code is sensitive.
