How to Build Your Own Voice Assistant with MyCroft AI - How Hard Can It Be? -- Episode 596

Why did I initially choose the Latte Panda V1 board?

Back in December when I was planning the project the Pi4 were really hard to get. And this board seem to be in roughly the right price bracket, a bit more expensive but around the right processing power. The Atmel co-processor also seemed a useful feature.

What is a bodi? Google was particularly unhelpful on that one.

There are many text to speech TTS engines available for Mycroft and most of them support alternative languages. You can even develop your own language.

Every time I saw the Mycroft project I wondered why on earth it was named that, after Mycroft Holmes.

By pure coincidence I picked up "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" the other day, and now I finally realize I had the wrong Mycroft : ) Well, technically the right name, but for the wrong reason, since the AI in that book is named after Holmes anyway.

Andy, go buy yourself a Bodi... 4 stars. If you look at my smarthab.us you will see that it speaks to you. A question can you change the voice with Mycroft?

I really hate the ones from the big players like Google, Amazon, etc, as they don't wake you and they are always in listening mode and tattle back to mommy.. LOL

one more point I despise of the use of WIFI, as it leeks, and can be hacked unless every node uses some sort of a Secure Communication Protocol, in between endpoints. personly I would just run it over a wire and forget about it. 

Well done Andy.

People have asked about how to reduce the cost.

There's a few options. The software should still work on older Pi boards or you could get hold of a refurbished business machine for not much. Obviously watch for the processor as that's key to using the newer wake engine. You can also swap out the speaker array for the cheaper Seeed board or even an audio mic + usb dongle similar to what I did on the Upcycled Furby project. The speakers are already fairly cheap but if you already have an old amp with speakers those could also be used with a usb adapter.

Brilliant!

I like the idea of independent voice assistants. Well done.