How To Set Up Snips.AI on Rock Pi S - Part 4: Back To Zero

Update

Snips.ai has been acquired by Sonos (see this message of Sonos) and Snips Console will be discontinued at the end of January 2020 (see this message of Snips). Under this circumstances, it makes no sense to continue this project. 😔

Installing Snips.AI

Well, you read until here, so I guess you really want to use Snips.ai on your Rock Pi S. So let's solve some new problems.

The usual way to install Snips.ai is to use another computer in the same network and execute the following steps:

sam connect <device>
sam init
sam ...

But - this does no longer work.

A Short Tale Of Workarounds

Currently (2019-12-18), it is not possible to install Snips.ai agent on the previously prepared Rock Pi S with Debian Stretch, hence there are no binaries for arm64-architecture of stretch. Unfortunately, arm64 is the current architecture of the Rock Pi S' CPU.

I've tried some things before I found a solution. This is the list of things that did not work:

• Installing the default way with SAM (first naive try)
• Installing manually with apt-get install (of course ...)
• Configuring / searching for MultiArch binaries (there are no arm64 binaries)
• Installing ordinary armhf binaries with MultiaArch (though they should be compatible, I got the error message "Illegal instruction")
• Compiling Snips by source (I didn't whether find the sources nor a tutorial / how-to)

I know, it looks like three trials in half an hour, but I worked one day on these trials. It was frustrating.

What Finally Worked

Finally, Ii tried the development binaries for Buster. This approach worked - but there are still some things to configure and there's no guarantee, that it will work on your Pi by executing the commands in the proper order, because I maybe forgot some lines when crawling my shell history. And you also will need a Raspberry Pi with a working and well-installed Snips.ai agent on it (we need some configuration data from there).

sudo bash -c 'echo "https://raspbian.snips.ai/410c_linaro_buster 9 stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/snips.list'
sudo apt install snips-audio-server
sudo apt-get install -y snips-platform-voice
sudo apt-get install -y snips-tts
sudo apt-get install -y snips-watch
sudo apt-get install -y snips-template snips-skill-server

But this is just the simple part. Now, we need to look, if everything works fine. Spoiler - it will not. First of all, there's a whole directory missing:

/usr/share/snips/assistant/

Create it using mkdir:

sudo mkdir /usr/share/snips/assistant/

Change the owner of this directory to the user "pi" (if you don't have a Pi-user, create one ...):

sudo chown pi /usr/share/snips/assistant/

To be continued ...