And this is why I've got gear on the way to build a DIY replacement with mycroft & field array microphone & a raspberry. I'll probably throw a blog post on hn despite not being true show hn
If you would like to really take on Siri and Alexa, I would recommend using beefier hardware.
Mycroft is hooked into some sort of mozilla cloud thing (deepspeech) I gather.
So plan is to roll a baseline and then see if I can local host a deep speech server
>I would recommend using beefier hardware
Plan is to ultimately deploy a gpu accelerated tensorflow integration so beefiness of hardware has been considered.
>RPi 3
4 cause true gigabit and usb 3
https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/
https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetson-nano-developer-...
One aspect I've worked out is how to make a balanced contact mic using two piezo discs stuck back to back with a rigid layer in between acting as the pickup. Trick is that as the two discs are back to back, they effectively produce a balanced signal and that alone helps eliminate so much of the static/noise that contact mics due to impedance are susceptible too.
Mic array...pretty sure the tech I ordered (respeaker 6 mic) is towards the top end of DIY mic arrays so hopeful that I'll get good real life results.
Also very keen to work out whether I can use tensorflow to filter out baseline background noise BEFORE feeding the audio stream into mycroft.
Planning on launching a new blog to document my experiments and failures on this ( https://kaizen.today - not yet live cause still waiting for said tech...but SEO links and all that)
https://www.matrix.one/products/voice Just read about that today, no idea if better than the respeaker option - software/support/features..etc, but may be worth having a look in too.
To my untrained eye the specs seem superior (higher SNR & sensitivity).
Respeaker appealed to me due to it being fairly mainstream. I've learned not to stray too far from the pack on SBC things. Community support & info falls off a cliff
Thanks for the helpful link