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Comment by mcrider | Hacker News Reader

I think there will be some cool applications with this and a Rasberry PI. I'm floating around this half-baked idea of plugging Rasberry PI's into the light sockets of my home (since they're all central to the room [better for audio and microphone quality] and negates the need of running wire all over the place) so that I can have voice controlled computers in all my rooms and play music/make calls/automate my home/etc. Being able to ask the computer some random question and get an answer without having to go to my computer would be insanely cool to me :)

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Agreed with this sentiment. Something that could ease its way into the home improvement segment is an embedded linux device with microphone input, speaker output, powered off 120VAC, fits in a wall box, and input for more microphones to form an array for better listening.

That's the idea behind getting it to run on the Raspberry Pi. Having it choose the mic closest to the person that says 'computer' would be cool.

Agreed here. Guess I'm thinking the best way to get this functionality into homes though is with a board spin of a embedded linux platform (i.e. RPi) that people could install into a wallbox.

A bluetooth speaker-like package would probably be fine too.

I've had exactly the same thoughts myself. I was thinking about using TP-Link WR703n's instead of Pi's but if they get the model A out in quantity soon enough, it would be a better choice.

Powerful computers that are so cheap you can permanently purpose them to tuning on and off a single light-bulb are a bit of a game changer if you think about it.

I'm guessing the next raft of patent trolling will follow the form "household item but with a computer/wifi in it".

I've already been working on something very similar for my car as I was sick of taking my eyes off the road to change the music etc. I already have a working prototype, but there's still some work to be done before its good enough to publish.

That's the idea, this is literally just the first concept there's a whole bunch of cool things to be done. I'd love to make it possible for others to build their own extensions too.

Awesome project, Rob! It's amazing what can be done with some cheap hardware and some ingenuity + existing services over the internet. We just blogged about your project on Hack Things. http://www.hackthings.com/star-trek-like-computer-with-raspb...

Android 4.1, and above, has offline voice recognition. I'm not sure about the current state of Android support for Raspberry PI, but you wouldn't have to reinvent anything.

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