rhasspy VS voicetunes

I've been working on this for a few months now and I think I have it to a point where I am ready to share. This is definitely a very niche solution but I am creating a new skill handler for Grocy for the Open Source Voice Assistant Rhasspy (https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy). My handler is here: https://github.com/MCHellspawn/hermes-app-grocy. It is not complete yet but getting there. With is skill and a working Rhasspy 2.5 setup you can do a lot of tasks in Grocy with your voice. So far you can create and delete shopping lists, create products and add and remove them from shopping lists, list chores, mark them complete or skipped, and more.

It'll run on a cheap Ubuntu box if you can't get a Pi.

And lots of people seem to like Rhasspy too:

  https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy

Here is one example https://community.rhasspy.org/

I tried Amazon's Alexa, the top end model with a display. Often it would taunt you about new/interesting things on the screen, but I could never get them to work. I'd had to memorize things to get even the basics working. Ended up unplugging it.

However Google's Assistant in comparison worked great, no memorization, and very useful. Sure time, weather, set timers, and alarms worked great with a very flexible set of natural language queries. Even more complex things like what will be the temperature tomorrow at 10pm, simple calculations and unit conversions. But also things like IMDB like queries about directors, actors, which movies someone was in, etc generally worked well. It seemed to really understand things, not just "A web search returned ...". Even more complex things like the wheelbase of a 2004 WRX would return an answer, not a search result.

With all that said I'm looking for a non-cloud/on site solution, even if it requires more work, most recently noticed https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy

I just found this one: https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy

Here’s the solution I built for that, with a combination of on-device voice control, and a Bluetooth remote: https://github.com/lukifer/voicetunes

Something I’d still like to add is a USB OTG emulation of iOS/Android/iPod/etc, so that the currently playing track shows on the dash, steering wheel controls can be used, etc, but my last experimentation a couple years ago didn’t go anywhere. (All the open source stuff for emulating CarPlay and Android Auto seem to be for the other direction: the dash, not the device.)

Offline voice-controlled jukebox using RPi via Mopidy, and just pushed a branch with Mac support via iTunes/Music.app

https://github.com/lukifer/voicetunes

I can vouch for Rhasspy, it's an amazing and flexible piece of software, though it does require some setup and tech knowledge (albeit with a usable web GUI); and it's very DIY on defining the actual voice commands. I recommend pairing it with Node-RED [0] for routing commands to devices, it has plugins for most things.

The only thing I struggled with was getting the wake-word config right: I could never find the right balance point where it responded every time, without also having annoying false positives, so I ended up turning it off. It does support multiple wake-word engines; I'm gonna have another go with Picovoice Porcupine now that they're opened up custom wake-word training for free.

I'm most heavily experienced with Rhasspy's sister project, voice2json [1], which I used to build a voice-controlled car jukebox [2], and it's been working fantastically. (It triggers from a Bluetooth remote, so no wake-word issues.)

For hardware, Raspberry 3/4 perform quite well, and strong recommend for ReSpeaker [3] for audio (either usb or 4-mic hat).

[0] https://nodered.org/

[1] http://voice2json.org/

[2] https://github.com/lukifer/voicetunes

[3] https://www.seeedstudio.com/category/Speech-Recognition-c-44...