Rhasspy.md

Website

A voice assisdant toolkit that bundles together the best of what open-source projects (and a few proprietary ones) have to offer today.

Russian language

It supporrts the Russian language decently with the following components:

• Porcupine for voice activation — it only has a few pre-trained English hotword models by default, but there are a some among them that sound reasonably close in Russian
  • Now that a fork of Snowboy includes training scripts for custom words, may be a better choice
• Kaldi for speech to text — just works!
• Fsticuffs for text to intent — turns a sentence into data about the command
• NodeRED and Home Assistant for intent handling — allows control over my Home automation setup and building new commands with reasonable ease without code
• Larynx for text to speech — showed up in the nick of time before I considered adapting RHVoice to work with it; has a few speech defects, but generally good

Handy advice

• The sounds that signal activation and end of recognition delay subsequent steps, therefore are best kept small
  • I learned that the hard way by first putting sound effects by R2D2 in Star Wars — seemed brief at first, the delay was barely noticeable originally, but over time the annoyance added up to rather a lot.
  • I found a recording of a few keypresses on a mechanical keyboard and cut out a single key press and release for start and end of recognition respectively — yielding an impression that it records commands with a tape recorder from the olden days. Cool and quick!
• Add some sentences to stop false positives from doing anything. Attach them to a name of the intent that does not have a handler. Phrases such as “stand down”, “ignore that”, “not you”, etc.
  • You can add responses later though, phrases like “okay”, “got it”, “nop nop nop” and the like — until they get annoying anyway 🙂
• I happen to have a particularly badmouthing friend, it was a lot of fun to teach the assistant to respond to him in kind, he himself also guided the process.