Show HN: An open-source, Raspberry-Pi-based Siri alternative

http://jasperproject.github.io/

by shbhrsaha • 12 years ago

191 81 12 years ago

jasperproject.github.io

m4r71n• 12 years ago

I'm not entirely clear on why it requires a WiFi adapter? Can you not use the wired connection? Module writing looks pretty nifty though, can't wait to give it a try over the weekend.

shbhrsaha5• 12 years ago

Yes you're right, it works absolutely fine over a wired connection, WiFi adapter not required.

hansch• 12 years ago

this might be a stupid question but HOW! :) after some troubles I finally got Jasper to boot up and first thing he does is complaining he can't connect to a network. So I connect my laptop via ethernet to the pi and try to reach the configuration site http://192.168.1.1:80000/cgi-bin/index.cgi but it just won't connect.

Might be something ridiculously obvious but I'm a total n00b when it comes to the pi...or linux in general :/

radiorental• 12 years ago

How are you able to achieve this. My install says its 'attempting to connect with -SSID-' and fails, even with the wifi adapter removed and I've confirmed it's got an ethernet issued IP address.

scribu2• 12 years ago

It says it's 100% open-source, but I can't seem to find the sources for the Jasper platform (not the Jasper client).

Even the "compile Jasper from scratch" installation method involves downloading some binaries: http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/software/#insta...

edit: more specific link

shbhrsaha5• 12 years ago

The client code at https://github.com/jasperproject/jasper-client comprises all of the source. The modified Raspbian distribution linked to in the Software Guide only includes supporting libraries and some configuration files.

scribu2• 12 years ago

Ok, but why do I have to both install some binaries and clone jasper-client?

http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/software/#insta...

http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/software/#confi...

I think it would help if you briefly described in the docs what https://sourceforge.net/projects/jasperproject/files/usrloca... contains, since it's fairly large (75 MB).

Although smaller, the same goes for https://sourceforge.net/projects/jasperproject/files/usrloca...

Otherwise, great initiative!

murali442• 12 years ago

Sweet! This is just what I was looking for to command my Sonos speaker to play some music.

bambax• 12 years ago

I'd be very interested in this; I've been looking for a Sonos API for a long time and could only find an old Perl script that doesn't seem to be maintained.

How do you plan on doing this?

Thanks!

murali442• 12 years ago

This is a nice python library for controlling a Sonos speaker.

https://github.com/SoCo/SoCo

apendleton2• 12 years ago

It's a shame that the quality of open-source text to speech engines is so much worse than the current commercial state of the art, as that's the most notable difference in the demo videos between this and something like Siri. Would fixing that just be a matter of recording more high-quality free sample libraries, etc., or are there fundamental technical challenges to solve?

k_bx3• 12 years ago

It's a shame no one did something you don't even have idea how to do? Do you really think it's a shame?

bsilvereagle• 12 years ago

I'm normally not a fan of condescending comments, but you hit the nail right on the head. It doesn't seem like some people grasp that a lot of open source projects are coded by unpaid volunteers in their free time in subjects they're passionate about.

Granted, there are commercial open source projects.

icebraining• 12 years ago

Personally, I really think it's a shame, yes. Why wouldn't it be?

gtirloni2• 12 years ago

Care to check a dictionary first? apendleton is not saying open source programmers should be ashamed that they haven't produce a high quality speech engine. Would you feel better if it was phrase like "it's a bummer that.."? Less hurt feelings?

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/shame

5. an occasion for regret, disappointment, etc

apendleton2• 12 years ago

I just meant that it was unfortunate, not that it was shameful. It's just a figure of speech.

ar7hur2• 12 years ago

It's mostly a question of training data. Google trains its acoustic models on thousands of hours of annotated audio samples. It's very hard of an open source project to i/ get enough data ii/ have the computing power to actually train with it.

welterde• 12 years ago

ii/ have the computing power to actually train with it.

That's hardly an issue.. You just have to know one person that works for a university and you are pretty much all set.

tomarr• 12 years ago

I wonder if the audio data from television programmes combined with subtitles would make a good training set. Here in the UK many of the subtitles are very good quality (presumably human transcribed), and would be easy to strip out non-language noises such as laughter (normally transcribed in brackets).

toomuchtodo• 12 years ago

Google used the GOOG-411 automated directory assistance number to collect data for training.

nl2• 12 years ago

I don't think that's true.

That is a big factor in the accuracy of speech-to-text engines, but I don't think training data is a problem for text-to-speech (which is what the OP was complaining about).

jpalomaki• 12 years ago

Sounds like this field could use some crowd sourcing.

What kind of data would be the most useful for learning? Would it be the same phrases read by different people, single words or is any text good? Do we need lots recordings from a single person or many smaller samples from different persons?

I'm thinking of a web site where people could contribute to the project by joining and then reading out phrases the system shows them.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 12 years ago

Economics is the main challenge because it's a difficult task and the demand for it is low (market is small if demanding [0]). But the mbrola people, who have a nice free speech synthesis program that also isn't opensource, [1] say it's a hard technical problem too.

[0] http://www.ted.com/talks/roger_ebert_remaking_my_voice

[1] http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

A lot of the DEC Voice stuff was part of a DARPA contract, it may be possible to liberate from some archive somewhere.

AndrewHart• 12 years ago

You can use Google TTS. It doesn't have a documented public API, but nor did Google Reader.

fixedd3• 12 years ago

This is using espeak. There are alternatives, such as Festival which, with decent voices, sound way better.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA0z6ztG7qU

outworlder• 12 years ago

The question is: how do you make it sound that good? Is that with commercial voices?

nshm2• 12 years ago

Despite people mention the lack of the data it's not a problem anymore. It was a problem like few years ago but these days we have access to thousands hours of speaker data. For example we have 100 hours of single speaker database at CMUSphinx, it's not a big problem.

Algorithms become a bigger problem these days. For TTS for example one has to implement hybrid speech synthesis technology combining hidden markov models and unit selection. Most commercial companies are using this technology, but no open source project has it released. The closest ones are OpenMary and Festival, but they are either unit selection or hmm, no hybrid synthesis implementation yet.

tylercrumpton2• 12 years ago

Great work! What sort of recognition distance were you able to get with that microphone?

shbhrsaha5• 12 years ago

Thanks. Depends on the conditions, but works most of the time around 10-15 feet away!

drincognito• 12 years ago

How accurate is text recognition (could you use it for dictation?) and how fast between the end of a command and recognition/parsing of said command?

JetSpiegel2• 12 years ago

If you want to do dictation, you can use the Sphinx4 project. It's in Java, and you have to write a bit of code, but it's an offline recognizer, you record the audio and then it doesn't run in real-time.

lukasm2• 12 years ago

Guys, could you tell me where did you get the music for your demo? How much did you pay? What was the process? Did you use something like MoveMaker?

I'm building a tool (prototype phase) for creating trail videos. One of the use case would be to create the demo movie of a product.

shbhrsaha5• 12 years ago

Sure, the music is from http://www.jamendo.com/, where some tracks can be used for non-commercial purposes.

lukasm2• 12 years ago

So you downloaded mp3 and used a tool like MoveMaker to make the video? Thx

atmosx• 12 years ago

That's amazing, I'm impressed. I have no idea how voice recognition software works, but is it possible using this open source project to add other non-Latin languages (e.g. Greek, Arabic, Japanese)?

gallamine• 12 years ago

It uses the CMUSphinx project (http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/) that is language independent. You can download language models for English, Chinese, French, Spanish, German, Russian.

JetSpiegel2• 12 years ago

I'm working with PocjketSphinx now, it's totally language independant. There is a paper floating around for Arabic, in which they used several reads of the Qu'ran as training data. For Chinese there's a model in the official Sphinx page.

nmadhavan• 12 years ago

Seems clean, useful, and well-documented!

bliker• 12 years ago

I think this is a great project! But Raspberry Pi might be a bit overpriced/overpowered for this task. Maybe something like Arduino Yún would be more appropriate choice. I am really hoping this movement of small GNU/Linux based home appliances will take off and lower the price.

tylercrumpton2• 12 years ago

How would using a Yun be cheaper than a Raspberry Pi? The Yun is currently twice the cost of a the RPi, and even taking into account the WiFi adapter and SD card, the RPi comes out far ahead.

You would also need to take the time to write drivers for the USB microphone and do realtime speech recognition, web traffic, and text-to-speech on the Yun's little 16MHz/400MHz processors.

This project is perfect for single-board computers like the RPi, and I can't imagine that you would get that far with a microcontroller.

samstave• 12 years ago

This would be an awesome voice control addon for XMBC/media play services from a Pi!

vidarh• 12 years ago

I was just thinking the same thing - I use XBMC on an Android TV stick now, with a wireless "airmouse" that's absolutely horrible to use, and I'd love a better option... For stuff that can easily be done with the XBMC web client, or a simple media remote it's not such a big deal, but it's not exactly a perfect solution.

yaeger• 12 years ago

I would love if that worked offline, too. Even if it is just a very limited use of voice recognition.

Like, Siri has to be online cause everything is processed on Apple's servers because there are so many things Siri could do. But if all I want is to be able to say "play <NameOfMovie/TVShow>", I would love it if that could be done offline. Even if I had to train the system myself.

Say I have 30 TV Shows in the library, I could see myself train the system the names of all of them if that meant I am able to actually start them via voice.

izqui• 12 years ago

This is pretty cool.

I would use Android's TTS (picotts). Audio quality is better.

sp3322• 12 years ago

Would it be easy to get this running on a normal PC, without a RPi?

0X1A• 12 years ago

The RPi is essentially a PC, the only real difference is that it uses an ARM processor so yes, I'd assume it would be rather easy.

sp3322• 12 years ago

Thanks. I've been looking at the code, and aside from a list of dependencies in client/requirements.txt, it looks pretty simple.

kylemaxwell• 12 years ago

Excellent, I've pondered doing something like this with a BeagleBone Black. Can't wait to try it out and see what I can do.

gourneau• 12 years ago

I am wanting to get this running on my BBB black. Hopefully it won't be that hard. It looks like mostly Python code, and a mountain of dependencies.

sarvagyavaish• 12 years ago

I am looking to use this / something similar at the startup I work at to toggle our robot's operating modes. I have a question regarding the voice recognition. Is the voice recognition stuff done on the Pi itself, or is there a service that Jasper taps into to perform voice recognition?

fixedd3• 12 years ago

It's using Pocketsphinx: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/

endeavour• 12 years ago

Is there a way to make this subtract any noise being outputted by the pi's speaker ouput, so that it can still understand me if I'm playing music/watching a movie?

kyle_martin12• 12 years ago

Well, yes this can done. Noise cancelation & voice extraction algorithms aren't implemented here but it's totally possible. It wouldn't be too bad to implement if you have a decent understanding of DSP.

kyle_martin12• 12 years ago

I actually made this exact thing Saturday afternoon. Great job!

First prototype was on an Arduino it and eventually ran out of firmware space. So then I upgraded to the RPi and from there it was a breeze.

Suggestions:

(1) Use Wit.ai for NLP. There is some added latency but the capabilities far out reach Sphinx in the long run. It's free. Less code to maintain. Easier to deploy and distribute.

(2) Try to find a small mic so that you can put everything in a sleek package.

(3) Add support for bluetooth speakers (you're on a RPi, it's basically done for you)

(4) 3D print a custom case, throw some 3M tape on it and it's ready to be wall-mounted!

fixedd3• 12 years ago

And use festival, not espeak!

crm416• 12 years ago

Great suggestions. I've been meaning to take a deeper dive into Wit.ai for a while now. It seems like their intents-entities architecture would actually fit in pretty cleanly with Jasper.

As an aside: I don't think it'd be difficult to developer Jasper modules that use Wit without modifying much of the original source (as long as the speech-to-text systems pick up on the text you'd need to pass to Wit).

hardwaresofton• 12 years ago

I also did a project like this last year -- I only got around to asking for date & time working, and was happy enough to stop going there...

I disagree with (1), however: In the interest of making WAN-independent software (as in, I don't want my home automation to stop working if I can't call out to wit.ai), I actually don't agree with that point. I think that using CMUSphinx can be made extremely accurate with continuous training (something I'm angling to put in my version).

Then again, I'm planning on making a competing product so differentiation is good for me. I think there are a lot of ways they can improve on the idea

ar7hur2• 12 years ago

Hi Kyle, Wit.AI team here -- thanks for suggestion (1) :-)

Actually our typical latency is less than 0.5s if you stream audio to the API (instead of waiting until a silence, then sending a WAV file). Also, we are working on an embeddable client (you would still use Wit.AI online to train your model, but then they can run locally on your Raspberry Pi).

tdicola• 12 years ago

Nice project--I like the code, it's very clean and well structured. You should check out the subversion trunk of pocketsphinx, it has support for keyword spotting built in so you can do things like instantly recognize the persona keyword to enable the system instead of running the transcription through pocketsphinx and hoping for the best.

Unfortunately the keyword spotting stuff isn't documented yet, but check out the code for my Demolition Man swear detector project which is using it: http://hackaday.io/project/531-Demolition-Man-Verbal-Moralit... The important bit is the ps_set_kws function call, this takes either a text keyword or filename with list of keywords. Then after processing audio call ps_get_hyp and it will return any spotted keywords. Check out the code here in PocketSphinxKWS.h/cpp: https://github.com/tdicola/DemoManMonitor

raghavsethi• 12 years ago

Great work guys! Looking forward to playing with this!

ohblahitsme• 12 years ago

This looks great! I'm only missing a USB microphone. I'll be sure to make this once I get my hands on one.

It also seems pretty trivial to set up Wolfram Alpha on here. From what it looks like, you'd just have to: 1) get a developer account at Wolfram Alpha 2) download this promising looking module: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wolframalpha/1.0.2 3) integrate it into Jasper (create a module)

I'll be sure to try it once I get it set up.

nl2• 12 years ago

This looks pretty good.

I've been working on a freetext question answering service, but more the question answering part (as opposed to the voice recognition side).

Looking at the documentation[1], it appears there is no way for it to handle free text questions ("What is population of X?" - where X is any country) since all words need to be defined in advance. Is that correct or am I missing something?

[1] http://jasperproject.github.io/documentation/api/standard/

cscurmudgeon• 12 years ago

Serious question: Why does everyone seem to confuse speech recognition with other parts of NLP (e.g. parsing)?

I can understand CNN or TechCrunch getting confused, but there seems to be a universal confusion here on HN too.

Not ranting. It is a bit exasperating to read comments and articles addressing only speech recognition. Siri is more than that.

smallfluffycat• 12 years ago

I need a french acoustic model, if anyone has one...

nshm2• 12 years ago

French acoustic model for CMUSphinx is available in downloads: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/files/Acoustic%20... You need to use it with French dictionary http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/files/Acoustic%20a...

achalkley• 12 years ago

Open Source project pitched like a product. This is how you do it peeps!

I like this a lot and I'm encouraged to see it.

jkldotio• 12 years ago

Excellent work, I've always wanted to see a real world use of pocketsphinx with python. When I looked a year ago the documentation was lacking. The module system looks nicely extensible as well.

gyosko• 12 years ago

It would be cool to trigger commands with my smartphone. I say "Open the door" he sends it to my Raspberry who then opens my door. Is this possible?

rob_mccann• 12 years ago

I had a very similar (albeit less-complete) hack a while back: https://github.com/rob-mccann/Pi-Voice

Show HN: An open-source, Raspberry-Pi-based Siri alternative

Related Stories