Mirror Mirror

A program to run a voice assistant with a graphical status display

NOTE: currently undergoing major rework, will be rebranded after that

I created this to be run on a raspberry pi magic mirror and be like mirror mirror on the wall from shrek/snow white, hence the name.

Details

The program uses pocketsphinx to listen for voice commands, while in the background running a graphical status display (using threading) with the time/weather. The voice assistant also uses the graphical display to show relevant information for the command the user used.

Commands

time
date
weather
joke
general greeting
news
definitions

The assistant listens for keywords, not phrases, for example:

"assistant tell me a joke" - this will work
"assistant tell a joke" - this will also work

The default wake word is "assistant"; this can be changed on lines 59 and 60 of main.py.

More coming soon!

Dependencies

vosk
pysimplegui (Tkinter port)
gTTS
requests
playsound
sounddevice
websockets

Required API key files

You will need to create a couple of files in a directory called Keys/. These are:

openweathermap_key.json:

{"key": "INSERT OPENWEATHERMAP API KEY", "lat": "INSERT YOUR LOCATION'S LATITUDE", "lon": "INSERT YOUR LOCATION'S LONGITUDE"}

newsapi_key.txt:
```
<insert api key here>
```

Important: Starting VOSK server

This project uses the VOSK speech recognition API, and requires a VOSK server to be running on port 2700.

For x86/amd64: You can run the VOSK websocket server using docker: docker run -d -p 2700:2700 alphacep/kaldi-en:latest
For ARM (also works on x86/amd64):
1. Clone the vosk server repository https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-server/
2. Download a language model https://alphacephei.com/vosk/models - I'm running this project on a raspberry pi 4, for which I found the en-us small model worked best - I didn't have enough RAM to use the normal sized model. Otherwise however the normal model is useful as it is slightly more accurate.
3. Extract the model into a directory called "model" which is itself in the vosk-server/websocket/ directory. (alternatively put it in the vosk-server/websocket-cpp/ folder if you are going to run the CPP version of the server)
4. Run the server - either asr_server.py if you're using the python version in vosk-server/websocket/, or asr_server.cpp if you're using the CPP version in vosk-server/websocket-cpp/ directory.