Hi,
since a couple of weeks I am happy owner of the Google AIY voice kit, a natural language recognizer connected with the Google assistant. It can be attached to a Raspberry Pi board and with the included items it is pretty straightforward to build a basic voice recognizion system. For more advanced hacking purposes a set of better nerves, and a battle plan is highly recommended.
First, when I found out about this exciting new project and gadget I immediately submitted a preorder, but since there was a moderate time of waiting connected to the process, I almost had forgotten I had ordered one. So the day when the postman appeared with the package was a very pleasant one. I immediately rushed into tearing the package apart and setting everything up. In the package one finds two pieces of prepared cardboard that is used to create a box for the gadget, additionally there are a speaker, a microphone, the required wiring, a button and obviously the main board for the voice kit.
Without any great difficulties I was able to get the basic system up and running (see the attached image). There is an SD image download available at the Google website with all the basic software included so the starting really is easy if you have at least some experiences of Raspberry Pi and Linux. Until now I haven’t done any further hacking, but just played with the assistant, listened to some jokes etc. However, I’ll intend to start with the further hacking during the following few days. I would really like to implement something useful for my own use, something that would make the life at least a bit easier, and naturally it would be extremely cool to implement a robot that could be commanded by your own voice. This is well possible thanks to the servo connections on the AIY board.
I recommend warmly the AIY voice kit for everyone interested in voice recognition technologies. My five year old son is very impressed and would really like to ask Google constantly about many kind of things.
I hope I’ll manage to create the following post without any bigger hassle and with a much smaller delay than this came out. Until next time!