Mycroft v1.5-popey

tl;dr: I followed a few videos, documentation sites, reviewed some source repositories, and used Home Assistant's Voice (PE) to make my own "Alexa" with Alan Pope's voice 😁

Going to put a bunch of links here for now, but once I have a more time I'll flush out all the information and create some type of Ansible playbook or big docker/podman-compose file to help other people do the same. Most of this was pretty straightforward, but some things weren't as much (e.g. using an Ollama version that has tool support & Whisper not supporting GPUs yet).

Software

• Home Assistant
• Ollama
• rhasspy + wyoming protocol
  • whisper.cpp - STT
  • Piper - TTS
  • openWakeWord
• Containers (Docker engine)
  • Nvidia Graphics - LLM acceleration

Hardware

• Home Assistant Voice (preview edition)
• TrueNAS Scale VM w/GPU Passthrough - Ollama
• 2 laptops for
  • TTS, OpenWakeWord
  • STT - wanted on one laptop w/GPU, but tl;dr: it is too old... & support is in progress RN 😢

Extra Links

A list of extra links for documentation, YT tutorials, and source repos to help understand things + piece them together

• Purchased HA Voice PE - https://cloudfree.shop/product/home-assistant-voice-preview-edition/
  • Promo code (I used a long time ago): SELFHOSTED
• HA Voice PE docs - https://voice-pe.home-assistant.io/documentation/
• Networkchuck videos
  • before HA Voice PE: https://youtu.be/XvbVePuP7NY
  • review of HA Voice PE: https://youtu.be/An4IapvutzM
• Alan Pope's voice
  • Heard it on one of the podcasts he was on, but here's a blog post about it: https://popey.com/blog/2022/10/blog-to-speech-in-my-voice/
  • Led me to this, which is an archive for the next link: https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3
    • https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
  • Their voice models are here: https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/tree/main/en/en_GB/alan/medium
• Ode to Mycroft - https://web.archive.org/web/20151217182149/https://mycroft.ai/
  • I always wanted a Mycroft device, but I'd always been too broke to afford them & then they went defunct. So, I made my wake word "Hey Mycroft" as a remembrance to their company.

Final product – Home Assistant's Assistant configuration