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After my previous smart home project with Snips.ai failed due to Sonos buying Snips, I was forced to find an alternative to offline speech recognition with Snips.ai. Project Sinos Unfortunately, there were no real open source alternatives. At least I couldn't find one. So I took matters into my own hands. Project Sinos was born. ("Sinos" is a pure artificial word, derived from the Latin Sinus.) CMU Sphinx - How To Listen Offline The first and apparently biggest problem was finding an open source software for offline speech recognition. To my astonishment, this was solved very quickly after I discovered CMU Sphinx . Developed by Carnegie Mellon University, it is the offline speech recognition tool. In addition, quite a few languages are supported (including German). It has little, very little competition. After the first quick successes, however, there were considerable problems in recognizing specific words in order to identify intents. I was able to f...

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 ...

After the 2nd part of the Rock Pi S setup , I was confident to get some sound out of the board after I made a little hardware hack and connected it to my speaker (with amplifier). Unfortunately, the command speaker-test -t wav -c 2 did not bring any sound out of the Rock Pi S. So there still was a problem left and I had to google it once more.  Thanks to DIYprojecz in Radxa Forum ... I was once more able to fix a problem. For details see  https://forum.radxa.com/t/audio-support-rock-pi-s/1686/28 . What needs to be done: sudo su route add default gw <your.gateway.ip.address> eth0 echo "deb http://apt.radxa.com/stretch-testing/ stretch main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/apt-radxa-com.list wget -O -  apt.radxa.com/stretch-testing/public.key | sudo apt-key add - apt-get update apt-get upgrade apt-get install -y rockchip-overlay rockchip-fstab apt-get install -y linux-4.4-rockpis-latest rockpis-dtbo apt-get autoremove chmod a+r /etc/group The N...

After the successful initial set up of my Rock Pi S, I started going on with my project self made smart home assistant. Therefor, it is necessary to configure the network interface. SSH Does Not Mean Network Is Fine Though we already are able to connect to the Rock Pi S via SSH, we probably cannot yet ping servers outside our local network. A ping to google.com, for example, will result in no answer: Destination Host Unreachable The reason is, that there is no standard gateway set in the network configuration, which causes, that only local network hosts inside the same subnet can be reached. The gateway is like the door of your flat. If You don't know, where it is, You cannot even leave your flat and see the rest of the street. To find out your standard gateway, there are different approaches between Windows and Linux. Maybe You need to investigate this for your client operating system. On Windows, You open a command line and type: ipconfig The output loo...

Update / Warning: Until now, I was not able to get this project working. So if You are looking for a working solution, this is none. Maybe You do not need to read the following part of this project, because they were written, before I figured out, that this will not work. As it turned out, the Rock Pi S cannot run Snips.ai any more (after a Kernel update to get the sound working).  (Original Article Starts Here) With the progress of my smart home assistant project , I finally found an adequate hardware with the possibility to connect up to eight microphones: the Rock Pi S from Radxa . What sounded like a promising small device turned out to be a little bit tricky. Inspired by an interesting  article of the german IT publisher heise.de , I decided to order a Rock Pi S for my project. So I took the version with 512 MB RAM, Bluetooth and WiFi (ordered at the at this time point only available store n Germany, maker-store.de ). After delivery and unboxing of the de...

Smart Home voice assistants (also known as "smart home", "connected home") are still very much on vogue. But, regarding to Gartner's hype cycle  for emerging technologies, it's already on the falling edge of the curve and on the road to its plateau of productivity. Which means: the hype is almost over and the technology will get mature in approximately less than five years. Controlling devices at home with the voice is no future any more. It is presence. While Amazon's Alexa and Google Smart Home already recognize your wishes by voice commands in the cloud, there is a small place, where some offline voice assistants have emerged. These can process voice commands without a connection to the Internet, which is a major advantage for your private sphere - especially, if you consider that e.g. the German Home Office plans to listen to such devices to enlighten crimes. Fortunately, there is a way to protect your private sphere though you want to use smart...