DIY Smart Speaker Emulates a Google Assistant

Electronic “helpers” like Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri can make your life a little easier, or at least answer queries like “What’s the temperature outside?” Normally, you’d just buy a smart speaker, or use such an assistant on your phone, but what if you wanted to create one from scratch? As demonstrated by Marcelo Rovai, it’s actually not too hard using a Raspberry Pi, along with an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense for “wake up” duties.

The concept is illustrated nicely by installing software to allow the Raspberry Pi to emulate Google Assistant, via a ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT for input. An onboard button wakes the machine to be able to reply to voice queries with LEDs used to show the state of the machine.

From there, the Arduino Nano 33 running a tinyML keyword spotting model is subbed in for the physical button. It's programmed to use its built-in microphone and to detect “yes” as a wake up command. When triggered, it signals the Raspberry Pi listen to and respond via cloud processing.

While similar devices are available for sale, this sort of project would certainly be a great hands-on way to learn about how such a system works. On a more practical level, constructing your own custom voice assistant hardware could provide some peace of mind about whether or not it is listening in on you. Additionally, with the Pi and Nano, you’ve got a bunch of GPIO available to sense and activate devices in the “real world.”