Friday Instead

Friday voice assistant

Friday is a always listening, offline, keyword spotting assistant.

Why would you want to use it?

Low latency, because it is all offline
Privacy, your voice is sent nowhere only stored for a few seconds in a buffer in RAM
No wake-word

A use case, what I use it for, is to turn on and off my lights at home by saying

släck ljuset | tänd ljuset

Which is Swedish for turn of the light and turn on the lights.

I intend to upload pre-compiled versions with pre-trained models for different platforms, if there exist any interest for it.

I also intend to try to make it easy to add custom keyword to the underlying keyword spotter. Today, to add custom keywords, you have to record about 100 samples yourself, it takes less than an hour. But then you have to retrain and all of that and it gets pretty tedious. I hope to make that easier in the future. But if you do want to add custom keywords now, please use this: Record your own, it is what I used.

Dependencies

This project depends on libasound2, there is an issue for adding it into the project, but until then one has to install it.

sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev

The libasound2 lib is usually installed on most Linux systems already, but if it isn’t for some reason, run:

sudo apt-get install libasound2

This project also depends on tensorflowlib, there is an issue for adding it into the project, but until then one has to add it manually, See goldfish setup for instructions on adding it for different platforms.

Features

I intend to add many more features in the future. You can take a look in friday/third_party how philips hue is implemented if you want to contribute something yourself! :)

Audio Device

By default Friday will pick the “default” Alsa device, this is specified in configs/recording.json. If you want friday to use some different
recording device: update the field ‘device’ in configs/recording.json

You can get a list of available devices with

arecord -L

On some systems you might have to run that with sudo, and then also run Friday with sudo if you as a user cannot see the audio devices.

Launching Friday

Compile the binary, this was developed with bazel 3.4.1 but have also worked with other versions. Please make sure you have all the dependencies setup before trying to compile.

compiling on linux laptop

bazel build //friday:friday --define platform=linux-x86-cpu

Compiling on raspberry pi

bazel build //friday:friday --define platform=linux-arm-cpu

Then launch with

# Set log-level to 5 for debug logging if something is not working
./bazel-bin/friday/friday
  --configs=configs\
  --logging=3\