Building a voice assistant to control music | Hacker News Reader

Building a voice assistant to control music

smalldata.tech

43 pointswheresvic113 comments

Is there a way to do this without an internet connection and without Chrome?

Have you had a look at https://snips.ai/? I've been meaning to play with it for a while but not gotten around to it yet.

Actually there is - there is a very nice library called pocket sphinx that does offline speech recognition.

However it's not quite so easy to use - there's a python package that interfaces with it but you would need to know how to grab your own audio sample from the mic and pass it to the library.

I actually managed to get a sample app running using it but I found that the error rate was around 50% and I needed to repeat myself quite a few times.

That mirrors my experience with it. I eventually gave it up because it was more infuriating than it was helpful.

Not to diminish all the hard work that the Sphinx group has done, but it's only at alpha quality ATM. I think it has potential, but I don't know how fast the development is moving.

Doesn't it suck only because it hasn't been well trained on a variety of voices?

Pocketsphinx is pretty far behind the state of the art in speech recognition algorithms. It also doesn't have a very large acoustic model.

You can greatly improve the recognition by using a restricted language model, however.

That very well could be true.

The challenge in doing this right now without cloud services is why I've got my own assistant... Without voice, until I find a good solution.

Something that really irritates me is that strictly speaking you don't have to have an internet connection, they could have a the DNN on-device for this purpose.

What if the lyrics trigger the music controls?

Excellent question - in general they don't! The voice recognition is smart enough that it can discern between music and speech (maybe there is to much melody?)

Cool I was looking to do something similar with my Pi with the Google Voice kit essentially to be able to control your Spotify, this makes me want to take another look at it for general use without a Pi or Python :)

Funny, I'm reading this in the gym not 2 minutes after thinking to myself it would be great to be able to change songs with weights in my hands. Talk about timing!

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