Greetings,
The first days with the Google AIY kit have been pretty rewarding; at the beginning most of the time has been consumed with Google assistant and asking all sorts of questions. For a person that isn’t a native English speaker it does not feel completely natural to use the gadget, but hopefully more languages will be added in the near future.
However, what is very nice with Google AIY Kit, is the opportunity to utilize the Google Cloudspeech API that supports over 110 languages at the moment. With the API one is able to build speech controlled user interfaces, dictation functionalities on each person’s mother tongue. The use of the API is not free, but at least there’s a limited trial variant available with which one may experiment and decide whether the use case will bring so much financial benefit that it’s worth the pricing.
Until now I have basically modified the cloudspeech demo application written in Python to understand some commands spoken in the Finnish language. In the source code I set the language code to the Finnish one and add a couple of phrases the recongnizer should interpret correctly.
# Set finnish as language
aiy.i18n.set_language_code('fi-FI')
recognizer = aiy.cloudspeech.get_recognizer()
recognizer.expect_phrase('sammuta valo')
recognizer.expect_phrase('sytytä valo')
In the while loop the result of the recognizion is checked, and a basic action is carried out.
if 'sytytä valo' in text:
led.set_state(aiy.voicehat.LED.ON)
All in all the speech recognizion seems to work really well and I could imagine a couple of use cases for my everyday life, e.g. dictating some messages, triggering some actions at home or finally build a robot understanding Finnish. What is regrettable that the AIY is not able to speak Finnish yet, but understanding is a solid basis anyway. I’m excited to see what will happen on this front during the next few months.