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Consumer IoT - build a smart voice assistant

The food has been grown, driven to a processing plant, sorted for quality, sold in the store and now it's time to cook! One of the core pieces of any kitchen is a timer. Initially these started as hour glasses - your food was cooked when all the sand trickled down into the bottom bulb. They then went clockwork, then electric.

The latest iterations are now part of our smart devices. In kitchens in homes all throughout the world you'll hear cooks shouting "Hey Siri - set a 10 minute timer", or "Alexa - cancel my bread timer". No longer do you have to walk back to the kitchen to check on a timer, you can do it from your phone, or a call out across the room.

In these 4 lessons you'll learn how to build a smart timer, using AI to recognize your voice, understand what you are asking for, and reply with information about your timer. You'll also add support for multiple languages.

⚠️ Working with speech and microphone data uses a lot of memory, meaning it is easy to hit limits on microcontrollers. The project here works around these issues, but be aware the Wio Terminal labs are complex and may take more time that other labs in this curriculum.

💁 These lessons will use some cloud resources. If you don't complete all the lessons in this project, make sure you clean up your project.

Topics

  1. Recognize speech with an IoT device
  2. Understand language
  3. Set a timer and provide spoken feedback
  4. Support multiple languages

Credits

All the lessons were written with ♥️ by Jim Bennett