“I was not happy with the long and not-communicated delay in delivery, but now the product arroved I am very positive about it. The hardware has more functions than I realised when ordering. The manual is slightly unbalanced. As long as it is about assembling the kit a four years old could understand. As soon as you have to install the software and to arrange certain Google settings you have to be in very bright mood to manage.”
“If you are outside of the EU, the Google AIY Voice Kit is a great solution for playing around with voice recognition and artifical intelligence. But in EU you have to register as a Business user to gain access to the Google Cloud Platform. That's really taking the fun out of it.”
“The kit was really easy to assemble. Took just under 10 minutes to assemble the hardware, and getting all the software set-up took around 40 minutes due to downloading. Can play around with using voice commands to do many things, including but not limited to:
Controlling any smart-device you have for lights or heat.
Check email and calendar, do updates and send messages.
If you are outside EU you can do all that and more.”
“The kit was easy to assemble. I tried to make it with Pi Zero but it didn't work out and I ended up using a Pi3 which I recommend to everyone as the application is a bit heavy on it.
The software works excellent and the repository is updated once in a while for anyone who wants to have the most recent version.
Totally recommend it for people who wish to experiment and build something with speech recognition.”
“My kids (5, 7 and 10) all pitched in, they loved connecting parts and folding the box. A couple of the folds were demonstrated in pictures but the cardboard didn't have drawn lines confirming that they were the correct ones. The hardest part is configuring the cloud services and I was disappointed that it wasn't more clearly explained how to make the device boot directly into voice navigation however after a little bit of googling and I was able to set that up.”
“The Google AIY tools are clean, simple, and the installation is pretty straighforward. However, I'd like to have an alternative system, targeted to more experienced users, that doesn't require me to enter my Billing Information, register as a company (since I live in the EU), and have a 1-year trial.
I'm making an alternative, open-sourced library, that includes text-to-speech using Pico2Wave in multiple languages, and speech-to-text using SpeechRecognition with Sphinx (with some built-in languages), so it can be used offline. Also, I wish to provide functions to use the button and its led, and ship everything in a ready-to-use Raspbian Lite for SSH configuration.
The main problem here is that a low-end Rasberry cannot recognise speech for a whole language in real-time, so I'm devising a system with expect_phrase and expect_hotword functions, and a more limited understanding of the language. If you are interested in providing this alternative, I can keep you posted!
As the manual said, Google top-secret plan was to build more engineers. You got me on this one.
Regards,
Juan C. Roldán (juancroldan.com)”
