Assembling the Google AIY Kit for Raspberry Pi

23 August 2017

The May issue of the MagPi, the official Raspberry Pi magazine, included the Google AIY kit, which enables you to add artificial intelligence to your Raspberry Pi. Specifically, it provides a voice recognition system, based on Google Home and similar to Amazon Echo. You press the button, ask a question out loud, and the box uses the cloud to analyse your question and find an answer for you. The answer is spoken in a friendly female voice.

It's been a busy few months, but I have now, finally, got around to assembling it. There were a few areas where the instructions were a bit confusing, probably because Google has redesigned its cloud API website since the instructions were written. At first it wouldn't work because it said I had to change some basic settings. It turned out that you have to enable all the activity controls, including ticking the box for using your browser and app history. I can see how using your personal data can make the service better, but the service is stopped from working without it. That sounds to me like Google is using services like this as leverage to get personal data.

So now, I have my assistant, sat on my desk. the button is usually on the top, but I've turned the box on its side and put a friendly face on it using stickers. Here's a video:

The voice recognition is pretty good, although the service is quite US focused, at least initially. When I was asking about places in my area, it was mishearing them as places in the US at first. When I asked about the weather in a local town, I was given the weather in another local town. Often the answer includes complete information so you can tell what the device heard, but sometimes it doesn't. I was hoping to be able to use it as a voice activated calculator, and so far in my tests it's performed perfectly. But it doesn't repeat the question, so there's a risk the question hasn't been correctly heard and I can't validate that. (You can fit a screen and then see what it understood, but that defeats the object).

It performs well for general knowledge questions, the time and weather forecasts. It knows a few funny jokes (it hasn't repeated yet, but I don't want to use it all up so I'm not asking it to tell me a joke too often). You can't set a reminder, get it to tell you the latest news, or shut it down using a voice control yet. Although the great thing is that it's hackable, so you could add all kinds of features or use the API for controlling different devices.

I am probably the last person in the country to assemble one of the original AIY kits (like I said, it's been a busy few months), but the Raspberry Pi Foundation advises anyone still interested in getting hold of one to subscribe to the MagPi newsletter. It says: "We can’t say for sure that the AIY Projects Voice Kit will be available for purchase, but we are pretty confident that a longer term solution can be found."

It would be great to see this become a commercial product, so that more people can enjoy building it, hacking it, and chatting to it.

The updated third edition of Raspberry Pi For Dummies is published September 2017.

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