With a few lines of code you can turn your Raspberry Pi into a nice chat parrner which executes, thanks to voice-control, your commands and even answers to you via Google Translation. The transformation from speech to text – and the other way round – are performed by Google services. And this works astonishingly well: The word-recognition has good match ratios without any training, the speech output sounds clear and is easy to understand.

For voice-recognition you will record a sound file, transform it into FLAC format and send it to Google. The Google servers are going to analyse your FLAC file and send back the text of the probably said word(s). With easy comparisons it is possible to link different words to several actions.

Because the Raspberry Pi has no Audio-Input you have to...

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1. First off, you need to get your Pi to transmit sounds by using PiFM, download the binaries from icrobotics (download), extract them and run the following commands in the same folder:

$> sudo python
>>> import PiFm
>>> PiFm.play_sound("sound.wav")

2. To expand your range connect a 20cm plain wire to the Pi’s GPIO 4 to act as antenna. GPIO 4 is the 4. pin on the on the left row (inner row) of pins. I simply cut a wire of its plug and twisted it around the pin.

3. Tune your FM radio to your preferred frequency, I’ll choose 106,7 Mhz.

4. To change the boadcast frequency run the ./pifm binary as following:

sudo ./pifm sound.wav 100,0

This will broadcast on frequency 100 Mhz. In most countries only frequencies between 88 Mhz and 108 Mhz are working properly.

Run the ...

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