Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

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Software has been mostly solved for a while. My issue is hardware. The way I read, is that to get proper voice recognition in many circumstances, you need a microphone array (for every DIY Alexa and Dot). Now you have a PI, the array installed on it and… it just stands around looking ugly and accumulating dust?

You want a case, but then from my research, cases can easily interfere with those arrays. So you need one that’s custom-made for the array you are getting. But no array I’ve seen does actually come with such a case.

Back when I asked (relevant subreddits and on tildes before I deleted my account), no one could tell me that any of my research had been wrong, but no one had a solution either. I posted the threads almost 2 years ago, so maybe things changed? I’m currently still using Alexa, but besides privacy reasons I’d also love custom software that can take the idiocy out of my assistant (mainly by using pre-configured commands that do what I want instead of sometimes guessing what I want; also for on-the-fly language switching, Alexa is atrocious when you want to request a band that’s not in your primary language)

I could probably get away with the kitchen and office assistant using a normal microphone, but both bedroom and living room need to recognize voices from most directions (and in the case of the living room, also have decent recognition through music playing).

If anyone has any solutions, I’d love to hear them.

When I researched ReSpeaker was one of the better solutions, they provide various mic-array PiHats, as well as professionally looking cases for the device. They also sell pre-build devices I think, if you're not into DIY. https://www.seeedstudio.com/category/Speech-Recognition-c-44...

(Just to male it clear, I'm not affiliated with them in any way)

Yeah, ReSpeaker looks like they have the best hardware for this. But the issue was, that they only sell one case, for their old array, which is barely available any more (neither case, nor array.

But! Now they sell the new array as USB array in a proper case! That’s not perfect as I’ll have 2 devices instead of one to place/hide, but it’s still a lot better than last time I checked their site.

Thank you, now I have plans for 2022 :)

Hah, and of course there is only one left in stock :/

edit: And I found a company in Germany that not only resells them for almost the same price, they even have a lot of stock.

Would you mind sharing said company? If you'd rather not do so publicly, you can reach me at <myusername>@outlook.com

https://www.distrelec.de/de/usb-mikrofonarray-respeaker-seee...

Note that I did not look into them, just found them when searching and bookmarked the site for next year ;)

How about putting a string of microphones around the room, say at the top walls? You can get I2S microphones (here's a breakout for one [1]), so you'd just need a bundle of 6 wires running around the room.

That breakout is $6.95 with price breaks to $6.26 at 10 and $5.56 at 100 which is probably a bit pricey for this application, but really you only need the breakout to make it easy to play around with it on a breadboard. The other parts on the breakout besides the microphone module itself are just a couple of resistors. The module itself looks like it would be reasonable to solder wires directly onto, so you should be able to build a microphone string with just the microphone modules, the wire, and a couple of axial resistors at each microphone.

Here's that particular microphone module at Mouser [2]. $2.64 for one, price breaks to $2.19 at 10, $2.02 at 25, $1.90 at 50, and $1.78 at 100.

There are other I2S and I2C and SPI microphones. The SPH0645 just happened to be the first one I found to use as an example.

I'm not sure though if any of these interfaces have enough bandwidth to support enough microphones simultaneously for this to work. You might need multiple parallel strings, or maybe a hierarchical system, like having some ESP32 modules on the walls too, with each ESP32 handling a smaller string of microphones, and the EPS32s reporting what they hear along with timing data wirelessly to whatever is doing the processing.

[1] https://www.adafruit.com/product/3421

[2] https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Knowles/SPH0645LM4H-B?q...

I love the idea. Somewhat impractical for renting, and it both requires more skills and even more effort. But it sounds like a cool project I’d love reading about in a blog :D

you mean like those string led lights? how about adding the microphones to the same strip for power and then an attached esp32 for data to a central one? that sounds nice

Can you use an Alexa and gut it while replacing the controller? I don’t know how it mixes the mics but you can have your case and array, hopefully the hardware isn’t dependent on the processor.

What about a controller you carry around with you that you can speak into, like phone software, a watch, or if you’re into the hacker chic look, a mounted mic you wear?

I don’t think speaking is even the best choice, it’s limiting, a phone can be a web interface, gestures over a sensor seems reasonable for basic controls and speech to text can be piped into it as commands though your phone you carry with you anyway.

If you’re controlling lights it’s less hassle though a GUI, and limiting it to voice will not make your life easier.

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