Building a Virtual Assistant for Raspberry Pi (eBook)

The practical guide for constructing a voice-controlled virtual assistant

Tanay Pant (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2016 | 1. Auflage
XVII, 109 Seiten
Apress (Verlag)
978-1-4842-2167-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Build a voice-controlled virtual assistant using speech-to-text engines, text-to-speech engines, and conversation modules. This book shows you how to program the virtual assistant to gather data from the internet (weather data, data from Wikipedia, data mining); play music; and take notes. Each chapter covers building a mini project/module to make the virtual assistant better. You'll develop the software on Linux or OS X before transferring it to your Raspberry Pi, ready for deploying in your own home-automation or Internet of Things applications.

Building a Virtual Assistant for Raspberry Pi walks you through various STTs and TTSs and the implementation of these components with the help of Python. After that you will start implementing logic for handling user queries and commands, so that the user can have conversations with Melissa. You will then work to improve logic handling to detect what the user wants Melissa to do. You will also work on building some useful applications/modules for Melissa, which will allow you to gain interesting information from Melissa such as the time, weather information, and data from Wikipedia.

You will develop a music playing application as well as a note taking application for Melissa, laying the foundations for how Melissa can be further extended. Finally, you will learn how to deploy this software to your Raspberry Pi and how you can further scale Melissa to make her more intelligent, interactive and how you can use her in other projects such as home automation as well.

What You'll Learn

• Design the workflow and discover the concepts of building a voice controlled assistant
• Develop modules for having conversations with the assistant
• Enable the assistant to retrieve information from the internet
• Build utilities like a music player and a note taking application for the virtual assistant
• Integrate this software with a Raspberry Pi

Who This Book Is For

This book is for anyone who has built a home automation project with Raspberry Pi and now want to enhance it by making it voice-controlled. The book would also interest students from computer science or related disciplines.

Tanay Pant is an Indian author, hacker, developer and tech enthusiast. He is best known for his work on 'Learning Firefox OS Application Development' which was published by Packt. He is also an official representative of Mozilla. He has been listed in the about:credits of the Firefox web browser for his contributions to the different open source projects of the Mozilla Foundation.

 He also writes for a number of websites like SitePoint and Tuts+ where he shares tips and tricks about web development as well his opinions on different products. He digitally published Code Zer0 in his younger days to spread awareness about cyber security and hacker culture.

He is also the chief architect of Stock Wolf, a global virtual stock trading platform that aims to impart practical education about stocks and markets. This platform has acquired more than 100 colleges and has players from about 15 countries.

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Build a voice-controlled virtual assistant using speech-to-text engines, text-to-speech engines, and conversation modules. This book shows you how to program the virtual assistant to gather data from the internet (weather data, data from Wikipedia, data mining); play music; and take notes. Each chapter covers building a mini project/module to make the virtual assistant better. You'll develop the software on Linux or OS X before transferring it to your Raspberry Pi, ready for deploying in your own home-automation or Internet of Things applications.Building a Virtual Assistant for Raspberry Pi walks you through various STTs and TTSs and the implementation of these components with the help of Python. After that you will start implementing logic for handling user queries and commands, so that the user can have conversations with Melissa. You will then work to improve logic handling to detect what the user wants Melissa to do. You will also work on building some useful applications/modules for Melissa, which will allow you to gain interesting information from Melissa such as the time, weather information, and data from Wikipedia.You will develop a music playing application as well as a note taking application for Melissa, laying the foundations for how Melissa can be further extended. Finally, you will learn how to deploy this software to your Raspberry Pi and how you can further scale Melissa to make her more intelligent, interactive and how you can use her in other projects such as home automation as well.What You'll LearnDesign the workflow and discover the concepts of building a voice controlled assistantDevelop modules for having conversations with the assistantEnable the assistant to retrieve information from the internetBuild utilities like a music player and a note taking application for the virtual assistantIntegrate this software with a Raspberry Pi Who This Book Is ForAnyone who has built a home automation project with Raspberry Pi and now want to enhance it by making it voice-controlled. The book would also interest students from computer science or related disciplines.

Inhalt

Contents at a Glance 6
Contents 8
About the Author 14
About the Technical Reviewer 16
Acknowledgments 18
Chapter 1: Introduction to Virtual Assistants 19
Commercial Virtual Assistants 20
Raspberry Pi 20
How a Virtual Assistant Works 20
Speech-to-Text Engine 21
Logic Engine 21
Text-to-Speech Engine 21
Setting Up Your Development Environment 22
Python 2.x 22
Python Package Index (PyPI) 22
Version Control System (Git) 23
PortAudio 23
PyAudio 23
Designing Melissa 23
Learning Methodology 25
Summary 26
Chapter 2: Understanding and Building an Application with STT and TTS 27
Speech-to-Text Engines 27
Freely Available STTs 27
Installing SpeechRecognition 28
Recording Audio to a WAV File 28
Speech Recognition 30
Google STT 30
Wit.ai STT 31
IBM STT 31
AT& T STT
Melissa’s Inception 32
Text-to-Speech Engine 33
OS X 33
Linux 33
Building the TTS Engine 34
Repeat What I Say 34
Integrating STT and TTS in Melissa 35
Version-Controlling Your Source Code 36
Obtaining the Code from GitHub 37
Summary 37
Chapter 3: Getting Your Hands Dirty: Conversation Module 38
Logic Engine Design 38
Making Melissa Responsive 39
Fixing Limitation 1 41
Fixing Limitation 2 42
Extending Functionality 45
What’s the Time, Melissa? 46
Committing Changes 46
Summary 47
Chapter 4: Using the Internet to Gather Information 48
How’s the Weather? 48
Define Artificial Intelligence! 50
Read Me Some Business News! 53
Text-Controlled Virtual Assistant 56
Selenium and Automation 56
Time to Sleep, Melissa! 58
Summary 59
Chapter 5: Developing a Music Player for Melissa 60
OS X Music Player 60
Linux Music Player 61
Module Workflow 61
Building the Music Module 62
Play Party Mix! 65
Summary 66
Chapter 6: Developing a Note-Taking Application 67
Design Workflow 67
Designing the Database 68
Inner Workings of the Virtual Assistant 69
Building the Note-Taking Module 70
Building a Note-Dictating Module 72
Exercises 72
Summary 73
Chapter 7: Building a Voice-Controlled Interface for Twitter and Imgur 74
Building the Twitter Module 74
Exercises 78
Building the Imgur Module 78
Creating the Tables in the Database 80
Summary 84
Chapter 8: Building a Web Interface for Melissa 85
Operating Workflow 85
Building the Web Interface 86
Exercises 94
Summary 94
Chapter 9: Integrating the Software with Raspberry Pi, and Next Steps 95
Setting Up a Raspberry Pi 95
Setting Up Melissa 98
Adding New Components to the Raspberry Pi 99
Making Melissa Better Each Day! 100
Windows Compatibility 100
Tests 100
Vision 101
Multi-Device Operation 101
Native User Interface 102
Offline Speech-to-Text (STT) 102
Where Do I Use Melissa? 102
Drones 102
Humanoid Robots 102
House-Automation Systems 103
Burglar-Detection System 106
Summary 106
Index 107

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.7.2016
• Zusatzinfo: XVII, 95 p. 27 illus. in color.
• Verlagsort: Berkeley
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Informatik ► Theorie / Studium ► Künstliche Intelligenz / Robotik
• Themenwelt: Informatik ► Weitere Themen ► Hardware
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Elektrotechnik / Energietechnik
• Schlagworte: home automation • internet of things • IOT • Linux • Python • Raspberry Pi • Raspberry Pi 2 • virtual assistant • voice-controlled assistant
• ISBN-10: 1-4842-2167-2 / 1484221672
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4842-2167-9 / 9781484221679