US Air Force research scientist Michael Hansen created Rhasspy as a privacy-oriented alternative to surveilling “voice assistant” products like Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri; the free/open project supports dozens of languages from German, French and English to Mandarin, Vietnamese and Russian, and is designed to run on Raspberry Pi-based devices.
It’s licensed under the very permissive MIT license, and is presently intended for “advanced users that want to have a voice interface to Home Assistant, but value privacy and freedom above all else.”
Rhasspy runs even when completely disconnected from the internet, and works well with Home Assistant, Hass.io, and Node-RED.
A typical voice assistant (Alexa, Google Home, etc.) solves a number of important problems:
1. Deciding when to record audio (wake word)
2. Listening for voice commands (command listener)
3. Transcribing command/question (speech to text)
4. Interpreting the speaker’s intent from the text (intent recognition)
5. Fulfilling the speaker’s intent (intent handling)
Rhasspy provides offline, private solutions to problems 1-4 using off-the-shelf tools
Rhasspy [Michael Hansen]
(via Four Short Links)