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Ask HN: Making a voice-controlled digital assistant

3 points by fuqted ↗ HN
This will be my first programming project. To start it'll be a simple alarm clock and eventually voice controlled lighting / whatever else I can think of.

I plan on using a door phone[0] installed near a drawer, wires leading to a compartment in the drawer with a Raspberry Pi on the inside and a speaker on the outside.

I've chosen voice to text[1] and text to voice[2] software and I'm generally good on wiring but beyond that I don't have much of an idea what making this will look like.

I'm starting as soon as my Pi comes in the mail.

Thoughts, ideas, concerns?

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-KX-T7765-Phone-Luminous-Button/dp/B001IEN67Q/

[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13045

[2]: https://www.naturalreaders.com/

I'm partial to Heather ^

6 comments

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CyberFonic
I think that you are under-estimating the processing power required to do speech to text.

The likes of Siri and Alexa use large computer clusters in the cloud to do their stuff. The phone is merely an I/O device.

Since the RPi has about the same processing power as a cheap smartphone, you might get more usable results using Google Cloud for both speech to text and text to speech.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
fuqted
https://9to5google.com/2016/03/11/google-accurate-offline-vo...

>Google has created an offline speech recognition system that is faster and more accurate than a comparable system connected to the Internet. While research papers are usually very theoretical, this new system is already running and has been tested on a Nexus 5.

>Using various machine learning techniques, Google has created a 20.3MB system that is 7x faster than a system connected to the Internet and only has a 13.5% word error rate. It was implemented and tested on a two year old Nexus 5 with a quad-core 2.26GHz processor and 2GB RAM.

I'm aware that this works with my Coolpad Catalyst (cheap phone)

Processor: 1.1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 MSM8909 1 GB RAM

A RPi is capable of this.

CyberFonic
Looks really good. Thanks for the link. I scanned the research paper, but didn't see a download link.

Did you find a download for it somewhere?

fuqted
That's the thing. I've found a ton of info on random digital assistants not made by a large company[0] and I even found a 13 year old who made a digital assistant with the RPi[1] but I can't find a download for stand alone speech to text software from a trusted website.

I'm likely going to use my phone's (Google's) dictation software and a Bluetooth dongle for the Pi.

[0]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/1/11136298/hound-app-ios-andr... & http://hackaday.com/2014/04/09/create-your-own-j-a-r-v-i-s-u...

[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/monty/

Way to make me feel stupid, kid.