DIY AI Butler Is Simpler And More Useful Than Siri

[Geoffrey Litt] shows that getting an effective digital assistant that’s tailored to one’s own needs just needs a little DIY, and thanks to the kinds of tools that are available today, it doesn’t even have to be particularly complex. Meet Stevens, the AI assistant who provides the family with useful daily briefs. The back end? Little more than one SQLite table and a few cron jobs.

A sample of Stevens’ notebook entries, both events and things to simply remember.

Every day, Stevens sends a daily brief via Telegram that includes calendar events, appointments, weather notes, reminders, and even a fun fact for the day. Stevens isn’t just send-only, either. Users can add new entries or ask questions about items through Telegram.

It’s rudimentary, but [Geoffrey] already finds it far more useful than Siri. This is unsurprising, as it has been astutely observed that big tech’s digital assistants are designed to serve their makers rather than their users. Besides, it’s also fun to have the freedom to give an assistant its own personality, something existing offerings sorely lack.

Architecture-wise, the assistant has a notebook (the single SQLite table) that gets populated with entries. These entries come from things like reading family members’ Google calendars, pulling data from a public weather API, processing delivery notices from the post office, and Telegram conversations. With a notebook of such entries (along with a date the entry is expected to be relevant), generating a daily brief is simple. After all, LLMs (Large Language Models) are amazingly good at handling and formatting natural language. That’s something even a locally-installed LLM can do with ease.

[Geoffrey] says that even this simple architecture is super useful, and it’s not even a particularly complex system. He encourages anyone who’s interested to check out his project, and see for themselves how useful even a minimally-informed assistant can be when it’s designed with ones’ own needs in mind.

a 3d printed case, sitting on a table with cactuses in the background, with a 3d rendered holo assistant reflected in a cone of polycarbonate sheets from a flat HDMI display pointed up

Anime Inspired Holographic Virtual Assistant

[Jessp] has created a very cute and endearing DIY virtual assistant called Maria. The build combines a 3D printed housing that uses a modern take on the “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion to render a virtual, three-dimensional anime inspired assistant that can take commands to get information about the weather, play music or set timers.

The hub houses a Raspberry Pi 4B and a 3.2 inch LCD HDMI screen mounted flat on its back to render the perspective corrected “Maria” character using a technique borrowed from the Pepper’s Cone project. Polycarbonate sheets are formed into a cone, allowing for the 3D effect of rendering the virtual assistant model. A consumer grade mini USB microphone is used to receive voice commands along with a consumer grade USB speaker for audio feedback. The virtual assistant offloads the text to speech services to Google Cloud, along with using a weather API and Spotify developer account to for its musical options.

All source code is available on [Jessp]’s GitHub page, including build instructions and STL files for the housing. We’ve featured open source voice assistants in the past, including Mycroft and a even a HAL-9000 virtual assistant (running Kalliope) but it’s nice to see further experimentation in this space.

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THP Hacker Bio: IamTeknik

[IamTeknik]’s reason for entering his home automation assistant into The Hackaday Prize is simple; we have smart phones, TVs, and even smart cars. Why not a smart house?

Like its namesake fromĀ Iron Man, Project Jarvis is an intelligent assistant with a bit of home automation thrown into the mix. The hardware includes the usual relays and door locks, but that’s just the start of it. There’s also a personal digital assistant, living somewhere in the space between the hardware modules and [IamTeknik]’s smartphone. Here, voice recognition, speech synthesis, and a Siri-like functionality is the name of the game. Jarvis is capable of answering questions, compiling reports, reading social network messages, and automating everything connected to the main base station over the Internet.

[IamTeknic] has been busy studying computer systems engineering and of course working on his project for The Hackaday Prize lately, but he was able to sit down and answer a few questions for our THP hacker bio. You can check that out below, along with a few demos of what his personal Jarvis can do.

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