Raspberry Pi Want A Cracker?

If you watch the old original Star Trek, you’ll notice that the computers on board the Enterprise don’t look much like our computers (unless you count the little 3.5 inch floppies that looked pretty close to the real thing). Then again, the Enterprise didn’t need keyboards and screens since the computers did a pretty good job of listening and speaking to humans.

We aren’t quite to the point where you can just ask the computer some fuzzy open-ended question like Captain Kirk did, but we do have things like Echo, Siri, and Google Now that do a fair job of listening to you and replying. In fact, Google provides an API that can do speech recognition and generation. [Giulio] used some common Python libraries to add speech I/O to a Raspberry Pi.

The example he shows is a virtual parrot. Of course, you could do that entirely with audio, but the way [Giulio] did it, the parrot generates strings of text and then speaks them. So it isn’t hard to imagine processing the text in some way.

Of course, there are hardware options. Or, snag an Alexa and see if you can snag a few million dollars in prizes.

15 thoughts on “Raspberry Pi Want A Cracker?

    1. I hate the idea of voice control. Unless the user is alone when using voice control, it’s a very anti-social, super-annoying concept. Imagine a bus, and train carriage full of people talking commands to their phones. It’s enough to make one worship the unabomber!

    2. I’m not sure how Android is doing it now days, but my phone can turn spoken words into text for messages or notes without either data or wifi turned on. Even in airplane mode. Not the most accurate, and I have to say “comma” or “period” to get even basic punctuation, but it does work.

      In case it matters, LG G4 running the provider’s 6.0 build.

    1. Isolinear chips for TNG and Voyager (with the obvious exception of bioneural gelpacks), Isolinear rods for DS9/Cardassian/Romulan tech. Duotronics were used in TOS-era, although these were supposed to be replaced by multitronic circuitry. That didn’t go well.

      ENT-era is a bit foggier. I’ll have to review the literature on that.

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