Building a Virtual Assistant for Raspberry Pi : The Practical Guide for Constructing a Voice-controlled Virtual Assistant

Build A Voice-controlled Virtual Assistant Using Speech-to-text Engines, Text-to-speech Engines, And Conversation Modules. This Book Shows You How To Program The Virtual Assistant To Gather Data From The Internet (weather Data, Data From Wikipedia, Data Mining); Play Music; And Take Notes. Each Chapter Covers Building A Mini Project/module To Make The Virtual Assistant Better. You'll Develop The Software On Linux Or Os X Before Transferring It To Your Raspberry Pi, Ready For Deploying In Your Own Home-automation Or Internet Of Things Applications. Building A Virtual Assistant For Raspberry Pi Walks You Through Various Stts And Ttss And The Implementation Of These Components With The Help Of Python. After That You Will Start Implementing Logic For Handling User Queries And Commands, So That The User Can Have Conversations With Melissa. You Will Then Work To Improve Logic Handling To Detect What The User Wants Melissa To Do. You Will Also Work On Building Some Useful Applications/modules For Melissa, Which Will Allow You To Gain Interesting Information From Melissa Such As The Time, Weather Information, And Data From Wikipedia. You Will Develop A Music Playing Application As Well As A Note Taking Application For Melissa, Laying The Foundations For How Melissa Can Be Further Extended. Finally, You Will Learn How To Deploy This Software To Your Raspberry Pi And How You Can Further Scale Melissa To Make Her More Intelligent, Interactive And How You Can Use Her In Other Projects Such As Home Automation As Well. What You'll Learn Design The Workflow And Discover The Concepts Of Building A Voice Controlled Assistant Develop Modules For Having Conversations With The Assistant Enable The Assistant To Retrieve Information From The Internet Build Utilities Like A Music Player And A Note Taking Application For The Virtual Assistant Integrate This Software With A Raspberry Pi Who This Book Is For This Book Is For Anyone Who Has Built A Home Automation Project With Raspberry Pi And Now Want To Enhance It By Making It Voice-controlled. The Book Would Also Interest Students From Computer Science Or Related Disciplines. Contents at a Glance 6 Contents 8 About the Author 14 About the Technical Reviewer 16 Acknowledgments 18 Chapter 1: Introduction to Virtual Assistants 19 Commercial Virtual Assistants 20 Raspberry Pi 20 How a Virtual Assistant Works 20 Speech-to-Text Engine 21 Logic Engine 21 Text-to-Speech Engine 21 Setting Up Your Development Environment 22 Python 2.x 22 Python Package Index (PyPI) 22 Version Control System (Git) 23 PortAudio 23 PyAudio 23 Designing Melissa 23 Learning Methodology 25 Summary 26 Chapter 2: Understanding and Building an Application with STT and TTS 27 Speech-to-Text Engines 27 Freely Available STTs 27 Installing SpeechRecognition 28 Recording Audio to a WAV File 28 Speech Recognition 30 Google STT 30 Wit.ai STT 31 IBM STT 31 AT&T STT 32 Melissa’s Inception 32 Text-to-Speech Engine 33 OS X 33 Linux 33 Building the TTS Engine 34 Repeat What I Say 34 Integrating STT and TTS in Melissa 35 Version-Controlling Your Source Code 36 Obtaining the Code from GitHub 37 Summary 37 Chapter 3: Getting Your Hands Dirty: Conversation Module 38 Logic Engine Design 38 Making Melissa Responsive 39 Fixing Limitation 1 41 Fixing Limitation 2 42 Extending Functionality 45 What’s the Time, Melissa? 46 Committing Changes 46 Summary 47 Chapter 4: Using the Internet to Gather Information 48 How’s the Weather? 48 Define Artificial Intelligence! 50 Read Me Some Business News! 53 Text-Controlled Virtual Assistant 56 Selenium and Automation 56 Time to Sleep, Melissa! 58 Summary 59 Chapter 5: Developing a Music Player for Melissa 60 OS X Music Player 60 Linux Music Player 61 Module Workflow 61 Building the Music Module 62 Play Party Mix! 65 Summary 66 Chapter 6: Developing a Note-Taking Application 67 Design Workflow 67 Designing the Database 68 Inner Workings of the Virtual Assistant 69 Building the Note-Taking Module 70 Building a Note-Dictating Module 72 Exercises 72 Summary 73 Chapter 7: Building a Voice-Controlled Interface for Twitter and Imgur 74 Building the Twitter Module 74 Exercises 78 Building the Imgur Module 78 Creating the Tables in the Database 80 Summary 84 Chapter 8: Building a Web Interface for Melissa 85 Operating Workflow 85 Building the Web Interface 86 Exercises 94 Summary 94 Chapter 9: Integrating the Software with Raspberry Pi, and Next Steps 95 Setting Up a Raspberry Pi 95 Setting Up Melissa 98 Adding New Components to the Raspberry Pi 99 Making Melissa Better Each Day! 100 Windows Compatibility 100 Tests 100 Vision 101 Multi-Device Operation 101 Native User Interface 102 Offline Speech-to-Text (STT) 102 Where Do I Use Melissa? 102 Drones 102 Humanoid Robots 102 House-Automation Systems 103 Burglar-Detection System 106 Summary 106 Index 107 Front Matter....Pages i-xvii Introduction to Virtual Assistants....Pages 1-8 Understanding and Building an Application with STT and TTS....Pages 9-19 Getting Your Hands Dirty: Conversation Module....Pages 21-30 Using the Internet to Gather Information....Pages 31-42 Developing a Music Player for Melissa....Pages 43-49 Developing a Note-Taking Application....Pages 51-57 Building a Voice-Controlled Interface for Twitter and Imgur....Pages 59-69 Building a Web Interface for Melissa....Pages 71-80 Integrating the Software with Raspberry Pi, and Next Steps....Pages 81-92 Back Matter....Pages 93-95