Robie

Building an Embedded Voice Assistant on Raspberry Pi: Robie

A few years ago, I gave in to the temptation of Audible’s free trial so my eldest daughter, who was eight at the time, could listen to Bilbo the Hobbit, beautifully narrated in French, as I then discovered, by Dominique Pinon.

Five years later, the Audible subscription is still running, and each evening one of our five children takes turns choosing the night’s story—either starting again from the beginning or continuing where the previous session left off. And all of this happens from Dad’s phone, which ends up being partially monopolized.

A Raspberry Pi 4B, an Adafruit Voice Bonnet (microphones, LEDs, and speakers), and a strong desire to quietly step into robotics had been sitting on a corner of my desk for a long time: the perfect opportunity to put my various learnings in Artificial Intelligence into practice.