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Show HN: Pi-C.A.R.D, a Raspberry Pi Voice Assistant

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Re: Show HN: Pi-C.A.R.D, a Raspberry Pi Voice Assistant

#81

Post by jerbear4328 »

krono wrote: post #41
pyaamb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love for Apple/Google to introduce some tech that would make it provable/verifiable that the camera/mic on the device can only be captured when the indicator is on and that it isn't possible for apps or even higher layers of OS to spoof this

Thinkpads come with that, an unspoofable indicator that will tell you with 100% certainty that your image is not being recorded or even recordable unless the physical operator of the machine allows it. Can't beat a physical cover if you really want to be sure!

Now make a cover for the microphone :)

Re: Show HN: Pi-C.A.R.D, a Raspberry Pi Voice Assistant

#82

Post by everforward »

pyaamb wrote: post #24
rkagerer wrote: post #5

I wanted to create a voice assistant that is completely offline and doesn't require any internet connection. This is because I wanted to ensure that the user's privacy is protected and that the user's data is not being sent to any third party servers. Props, and thank you for this.

I would love for Apple/Google to introduce some tech that would make it provable/verifiable that the camera/mic on the device can only be captured when the indicator is on and that it isn't possible for apps or even higher layers of OS to spoof this

You could probably add that if you were sufficiently motivated. Either by adding an LED on the power or data path, or by adding a physical switch. I think it should be fairly easy on laptops; I'm not sure where you'd jam the hardware in a phone or if you can access the cables for the camera/mic without messing with traces.

I'm a little curious if iPhones could be modified to route the {mic,camera} {power,data} through the silent mode switch, either instead of or in addition to the current functionality. I don't really have a need for a physical silent mode toggle, I'm totally fine with doing that in the settings or control panel.

Re: Show HN: Pi-C.A.R.D, a Raspberry Pi Voice Assistant

#83

Post by BizarroLand »

baobun wrote: post #25
pawelduda wrote: post #17

All I need is a voice assistant that: - RPi 4 can handle, - I can integrate with HomeAssistant, - is offline only, and doesn't send my data anywhere. This project seems to be ticking most, if not all of the boxes, compared to anything else I've seen. Good job! While at it, can someone drop a recommendation for a Rpi-compatible mic for Alexa-like usecase?

Check out Rhasspy. You won't get anything practically useful running LLMs on the 4B but you also don't strictly need LLM-based models. In the Rhasspy community, a common pattern is to do (cheap and lightweight) wake-word detection locally on mic-attached satellites (here 4B should be sufficient) and then stream the actual recording (more computational resources for better results) over the local network to a central…

I have a decent home server, is there a system like this where the heavy lifting can be run on my home server but the front end piped to a ras-pi with speaker/camera, etc. ?

If not, any good pointers to start adapting this platform to do that?

Re: Show HN: Pi-C.A.R.D, a Raspberry Pi Voice Assistant

#84

Post by everforward »

phkahler wrote: post #75
baobun wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Rhasspy. You won't get anything practically useful running LLMs on the 4B but you also don't strictly need LLM-based models. In the Rhasspy community, a common pattern is to do (cheap and lightweight) wake-word detection locally on mic-attached satellites (here 4B should be sufficient) and then stream the actual recording (more computational resources for better results) over the local network to a central…

>> and then stream the actual recording (more computational resources for better results) over the local network to a central hub. This frustrates me. I ran Dragon Dictate on a 200MHz PC in the 1990s. Now that wasn't top quality, but it should have been good enough for voice assistants. I expect at least that quality on-device with an R-Pi today if not better. IMHO the end game is on-device speech recognition and any…

> IMHO the end game is on-device speech recognition and anything streaming audio somewhere else for processing is delaying this result.

Why? There's practically no latency to a central hub on the local network. A Raspberry Pi is probably over-specced for this, but I do very much see value in buying 5 $20 speaker/mic streaming stations and a $200 hub instead of buying 5 $100 Raspberry Pis.

If anything, I would expect the streaming to a hub solution to respond faster than the locally processed variant. My wifi latency is ~2ms, and my PC will run Whisper way more than 2ms faster than a Raspberry Pi. Add in running a model and my PC runs circles around a Raspberry Pi.

> I ran Dragon Dictate on a 200MHz PC in the 1990s. Now that wasn't top quality, but it should have been good enough for voice assistants. I expect at least that quality on-device with an R-Pi today if not better.

You should get that via Whisper. I haven't used Dragon Dictate, but Whisper works very well. I've never trained it on my voice, and it rarely struggles outside of things that aren't "real words" (and even then it does a passable job of trying to spell it phonetically).

No idea about resources. It's such an unholy pain in the ass to get working in the same process as LLMs on Windows that I'm usually just ecstatic it will run. One of these days I'll figure out how to do all the passthroughs to WSL so I can yet again pretend I'm not using Windows while I use Windows (lol).

Re: Show HN: Pi-C.A.R.D, a Raspberry Pi Voice Assistant

#85

Post by gazelle21 »

pawelduda wrote: post #17

All I need is a voice assistant that: - RPi 4 can handle, - I can integrate with HomeAssistant, - is offline only, and doesn't send my data anywhere. This project seems to be ticking most, if not all of the boxes, compared to anything else I've seen. Good job! While at it, can someone drop a recommendation for a Rpi-compatible mic for Alexa-like usecase?

[dead]

Re: Show HN: Pi-C.A.R.D, a Raspberry Pi Voice Assistant

#86

Post by fnordpiglet »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #64
fnordpiglet wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a professional technology person I say “computer” about 1megatoken per day

Yeah, but how often do you say "computer" in a querying/interrogatory tone? That's a perfect opportunity to get better at cosplaying a Starfleet officer. (Seriously though, a Federation-grade system would just recognize from context whether or not you meant to invoke the voice interface. Federation is full of near-AGI in simple appliances. Like the sliding doors that just know whether you want to go through them, or…

While totally true it’s not a good reason to use it as a wake word in 2024 with my raspberry pi voice assistant ;-)

Re: Show HN: Pi-C.A.R.D, a Raspberry Pi Voice Assistant

#89

Post by krono »

jerbear4328 wrote: post #81
krono wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinkpads come with that, an unspoofable indicator that will tell you with 100% certainty that your image is not being recorded or even recordable unless the physical operator of the machine allows it. Can't beat a physical cover if you really want to be sure!

Now make a cover for the microphone :)

Good point, I did conveniently gloss over that one didn't I!

A switch to break the physical wire connection is about the only thing I can come up with out of hand right now. I believe the PinePhones come with physical switches for their antenna's so there's that.

Re: Show HN: Pi-C.A.R.D, a Raspberry Pi Voice Assistant

#90

Post by t-vi »

nkaz123 wrote: post #9
harwoodr wrote: post #2

I see that a speaker is in the hardware list - does this speak back?

Yes! I'm currently using https://espeak.sourceforge.net/ , so it isn't especially fun to listen to though. Additionally, since I'm streaming the LLM response, it won't take long to get your reply. Since it does it a chunk at a time, there's occasionally only parts of words that are said momentarily. Also of course depends on what model you use or what the context size is for how long you need to wait.

When I did a similar thing (but with less LLM) I liked https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS but back then I needed to cut out the conversion step from tensor to a list of numbers to make it work really nicely.
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