Gadgetory

Helen I'm garrison from Android Authority now google recently announced support for the Raspberry Pi for its Google assistant API that company's cloud services which is absolutely brilliant idea because it means that hobbyists and education is the makers can now start to build small projects at home that have voice activation and are connected to Google services now once I heard about this I thought to myself well I've got to build a project to show you how great fun that's going to be to build while I was doing that Google actually released a special kit called the voice kit that includes a special piece of hardware called The Voice hat for the Raspberry Pi that has a microphone and a speaker built into it and some special software which kind of means all this stuff just happens automatically without you having to do lots of programming now I thought that would be a great thing to demonstrate to you and I tried to get hold of one now it was officially released on the front of the magpie magazine the official roster fire magazine but I couldn't get when I looked online I asked one of my colleagues Robert Trix to go out to the shops in London see if he could find one he couldn't find one so they're really hard to get at the time of making this video but it certainly gave me a clue about what Google were intending with this Google assistant API so I tried some more and I took what I learned from the voice kick and I took what I had here at home and I still managed to make a Google assistant running on a Raspberry Pi so if you'd like to know how to do it let me explain okay first things first do this you're going to need a Raspberry Pi 3 okay and that's the big one which is got the quad core a 50 C processor in it's got lots of USB ports it's got Wi-Fi built into it so that's a really good device to have to do this because they need to be tethered necessarily to a network with an Ethernet cable you're going to need a speaker of some kind that has connection for a 3.5 millimeter jack plug as one of those here and you're going to need some kind of button and I've got a button here on a breadboard that you can use for pressing the button to activate the Raspberry Pi and then need a USB microphone I'll talk about that in a moment and of course while you're doing setup you're going to need a mouse and a keyboard and a monitor and so on to actually configure your Raspberry Pi now basically what we're going to do is when you take the voice kit software but Google are providing on their AI projects or website and we're going to modify it slightly not to work with the voice happ's hardware that they're giving away with the kit but actually to work with a normal speaker and with a USB microphone for the first step is to download that SD card image now all of the links and all the actual details are step by step because you're going to find in the article that accompanies this video that's over on the under authority comm website I really recommend you following the steps there but in broad strokes what you need to do is you need to download that image and write it on to an SD card and then boot your Raspberry Pi with of course a mouse keyboard and wanted to connect it to it now once you've done that we need to edit a few things because that version of Linux is running on the Raspberry Pi is specifically looking for the voice hat that special piece of hardware that Google are having their kit to do the microphone and to do the speaker output so we're going to need to change it now to do that you need to modify the booth slash config dot text file at the bottom there you'll notice that Google have commented out support for the built-in sound card of the Raspberry Pi and they've added in support for the voice app and we need to undo that change so we need to comment out Google's things and to put in again support for the Raspberry Pi and while you're there on your Raspberry Pi you're going to need to configure access to secure share you do that by going to the menu and then finding the Raspberry Pi configuration program those interfaces and then make sure that SSH is enabled and you also need to make sure that your network is configured go up to the Wi-Fi sign up on the top right hand corner by the clock and configure it your Wi-Fi network now you do one other thing before you reboot and that is to edit the file slash etc slash a sound dot cold now that's basically the sound configuration file that Linux uses to work out what sound hardware is connected now again the one that's shipped with it is expecting the voice hat a piece of hardware but we're going to change it so that you can actually just use a USB mic and you can use the 3.5 millimeter sound jack that you get on the motherboard now you'll find the configuration file that you need to put in there again over in the article on the Android home website now once you've done that it's time to reboot so the first thing I check is that the sound is working now there are two little more minor steps we need to go through first of all there's a file that is a Python file but Google are using to check that the audio is okay and that's expecting again the voice has hardware now give details over there when how you change that so that it can use the built-in hardware once you've changed that file you just need to plug in a micro USB microphone now I didn't have a USB microphone handy so a bit of a tip I did have an old webcam knocking about and I took the webcam and plug that in and the Raspberry Pi was able to detect the microphone that was built into the webcam and use that instead so if you don't go out and buy one don't have one you can actually use an old webcam if you don't even need to get hold of a Raspberry Pi compatible USB microphone now once you have the microphone plugged in once you've changed the script to make sure it's using the internal hardware then you need to double-click on that check audio link that you find on the desktop and that will ask you then to check that you can hear the sound coming out the speaker and it will also check so it can record your voice and repeat it to you on the speak and if you've done back the you're halfway to getting this system working testing testing 1 2 3 the reason you did your Raspberry Pi case to be infinite is because a lot of these heavy lifting is done using Google's cloud services so to get this Google assistant working on the right with high you're going to need to connect to and configure a cloud services account over at Google now all the details on how you do this are found in this article and also Google have published them on the voice kit website and again there are links over at the article for that basically what you need to do is go over there you log in you create a new project you enable the Google assistant API for that project you need to create some credentials for logging in so it knows that your raspberry pi is authorized to log into your account and you do that by creating some o author credentials and you then download the JSON file which has those credentials in and you put them on your raspberry pi renaming the file to assistant Jason and once you've done that it should work with the Google's Google's cloud services now the last thing you need is a switch for activating the voice control now basically here I've got a breadboard with a switch and you need to take two wires from the breadboard here over to the Raspberry Pi one needs to make it to GPIO pin 23 and the other one needs to be connected to any of the ground pins and what happens is the software that Google provided monitors that GPIO pin and when you press the button it then starts listening for your voice command and finally to get it we're running you just need to run main Python which is a file that's part thereof the kit again detailed in the article and that will set this whole thing in motion and this is what it sounds like when it's working who is the queen of England according to Wikipedia elizabeth ii has been Queen of the United Kingdom Canada Australia and New Zealand since the 6th of February 1952 now the voice kit comes with a nice cardboard box at Google of made but you can use your imagination to put your raspberry pie into any kind of cardboard box if you like cut some holes in it now I'm going to show you the one that I've made I'm a software engineer not a hardware engineer so don't laugh at my creation here but here's my box what time is it currently eleven twenty three years okay and it does work and you I'm sure you could do better if you do please do post pictures in the comment I would love to see the boxes that you make for your Raspberry Pi now as a final wrap-up what have we done we've downloaded the voice kit software from Google which has already been shipped ready to work with the Google assistance we've modified it a bit to work with the standard hardware rather than the voice kit hardware we've configured the Google cloud so that we can actually access the Google Assistant API and then we built a switch which is what triggers the voice activation and then we put it all into a nice cardboard case but this isn't the end you can also extend this further now Google of given instructions on how you can make your own triggers and they've got a little demo project there where you can say light on light off and it will turn an LED on or off on your grass with pineapples that could be extended to all manner of things so this kit is extensible you can actually just change it to do home automation to control robots to do whatever you want to do that you can do on a Raspberry Pi it can now be voice-activated I'm going Sims from an authority I really do hope you enjoyed this look at how to make your own Google assistant with a Raspberry Pi if you did please do give it a thumbs up please subscribe to the anti-authority youtube channel hit that Bell so that you get notifications whenever we release a new video 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