Building Your Own Open Source, Privacy-Protecting Voice Assistant With A Raspberry Pi

'PC Magazine's "tech nerd" Whitson Gordon writes that "Once you start
using a smart speaker to set reminders, play the news, or turn the
lights on, it's hard to go back."

But if you want the convenience of voice control without the
data-collecting tech giant behind the scenes, an open-source project
called Mycroft is a great alternative. And you can run it right on a
Raspberry Pi.

Mycroft is a free, open-source voice assistant designed to run on
Linux-based devices... Mycroft has been around for quite a few years,
but it's recently gained a bit more notoriety thanks to privacy
concerns surrounding data collection at Amazon and Google. Unlike
those assistants, Mycroft only collects data if you opt in during
setup. And for the users who do opt in, Mycroft promises never to sell
your data to advertisers or third parties -- instead, it only uses it
to help developers improve the product. Mycroft even uses the
privacy-focused DuckDuckGo as its search engine instead of Google when
you ask for information.

Mycroft makes its own smart speaker called the Mark I, though it's
currently sold out with a new Mark II (video here) on the way.
However, since the project is open-source, you can install Mycroft on
just about any Linux machine, including the Raspberry Pi (thanks to a
pre-made build called Picroft). Using Mycroft on the Pi is free, but
you can also subscribe to a $1.99-per-month plan to help support its
development -- you'll even get a few goodies, like other voices that
sound more lifelike than the default robotic voice.'

-- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/12/14/1954242

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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