AssistantPi

AssistantPi is basically a tweak of AlexaPi allowing you to run Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa on a Raspberry Pi. It includes the Google Assistant SDK and uses AlexaPi's hotword recognition to activate either Assistant or Alexa. The installer provides an easy way to get everything set up in just under an hour.

This is just an experimental proof-of-concept without broad support.

Credits / Further Resources:

Requirements

You will need:

A Raspberry Pi and an SD Card with a fresh install of Raspbian
Audio peripherals:
- external speaker with 3.5mm Jack
- USB microphone

Installation

Have your Raspberry Pi running Raspbian ready and connected to the Internet. I recommend to use a fresh install of Raspbian Jessie Lite without Pixel.
Follow this Google Guide and place the Google Assistant Credentials JSON in /home/pi/Downloads/client_secret.json
Prepare Amazon AVS Credentials as described in Step 1 in AlexaPi Installation Guide, you'll need them during Installation. Even if you only want Google Assistant, this has to be done for AlexaPi to work properly.
Connect your audio peripherals (i.e. USB-Mic and Speaker via Jack).
Clone this repository to /opt directory and rename the folder to AlexaPi (both important, it will fail otherwise):
```
 cd /opt
 sudo git clone https://github.com/xtools-at/AssistantPi.git AlexaPi
```
Run the setup and go through all the steps. This will take a while, approx. 25min with a somewhat good Internet connection.
```
 sudo /opt/AlexaPi/src/scripts/setup.sh
```

If Authentication with Google Assistant API fails during setup, try to run it manually:

 /opt/AlexaPi/env/bin/python -m googlesamples.assistant.auth_helpers --client-secrets /home/pi/Downloads/client_secret.json

If you haven't opted for starting AssistantPi at boot, or the Installer threw an error during setup, start the script manually using python /opt/AlexaPi/src/main.py. Otherwise, it will be started automatically when the setup finishes.
Trigger Assistant and Alexa with the hotwords Google and Alexa

Audio problems

Make sure you've been to sudo raspi-config, Advanced Options > Audio and have set the desired audio output (i.e. 3.5mm Jack, not HDMI).

Please refer to the following guides if you encounter any audio problems:

Configure Google Assistant Audio Output

AlexaPi Audio Setup and Debugging

Change Hotwords

To change the hotwords (currently Alexa and Google), change both these files before running the setup:

.../src/config.template.yaml (phrase and phrase_assistant) and .../src/keyphrase.list

In the latter, you can also tweak the sensitivity of the hotword recognition. See here for more information on this topic.

Also make sure that your new hotwords are included in the language model. Check the following directory for a file with .dict or .dic extension and add your hotwords if not already there: /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pocketsphinx/model/

Change Hotword language

If you want to change the language for the hotword recognition (which might be necessary if your hotwords aren't recognized well), head over to CMU Sphinx download page and get the model files for your language. In particular, you have to place the following files

FILENAME.lm.bin
FILENAME.dic

in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pocketsphinx/model/ and the contents of

FILENAME.tar.gz

in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pocketsphinx/model/[lng-lng] (where [lng-lng] is the language code of your imported language, e.g. 'de-de')

Make sure, that FILENAME.dic contains your desired hotwords (i.e. Alexa and Google for default settings), if not, add them.

Afterwards, either

change /opt/AlexaPi/src/config.template.yaml
- find language and dictionary attributes in pocketsphinx configuration
- change language to your language code (e.g. 'de-de', see above)
- change dictionary to your FILENAME.dic (e.g. 'cmusphinx-voxforge-de.dic')
run the Installer and create a new AlexaPi Profile

change /etc/opt/AlexaPi/config.yaml the same way as above

Install German language package

For German, there's an language package coming with AssistantPi. During the installation steps, just after you've cloned the repository:

cd /opt
sudo git clone https://github.com/xtools-at/AssistantPi.git AlexaPi

Change the branch to include the German language package and get the edited config.yaml:

sudo git checkout feature/german

Install pocketsphinx. This is the responsible module for the hotword recognition.

pip install pocketsphinx

Install the language package, running as root (or copy the files in .../src/german manually as described above):

sudo bash /opt/AlexaPi/src/german/install.sh

Proceed with Setup as above in the Installation instructions (i.e. run the AssistantPi installer script)