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”.
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
How To Set Up GassistPi On Google AIY:
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]
Adventitious Geekery and other distractions created or curated by Matthew "Atari" Eargle