SUSI.AI Smart Speaker release 20191105

After long and painful times due to the switch to buster, we at the FOSSASIA Team finally can release a new stable build of SUSI.AI for our RaspberryPi based smart speaker.

SUSI.AI aims at bringing a privacy aware personal assistant onto all of your devices. It runs on Android phones, desktop computers, and RaspberryPi based smart speakers. With the switch to Debian/buster, a lot of problems creeped in and the main application became extremely unstable, crashing in libportaudio2 with very unclear symptoms. Thanks to hint by Felix Yan we were able to fix libportaudio2 locally, and finally got a working and stable image.

During the last summer, a great team of GSoC students have worked on SUSI.AI in general, and on the smart speaker in particular. At the moment SUSI.AI can be installed onto RaspberryPi as well as any Debian based distribution (in particular Debian/buster and Ubuntu 19.04 upward). Core components of the SUSI.AI system are:

• SUSI Server: the brain of the SUSI.AI system, which interprets questions and provides answers using a variety of built-in and user-created skills (Java)
• SUSI Linux: the frontend for desktops and raspberry pis, listening to hotwords, and using speech-to-text to convert to text, querying the SUSI Server, and responding via text-to-speech conversion on the smart speaker (Python)
• SUSI Skills: User editable skill database, where writing new skills is as easy as editing Wiki pages

plus a lot of setup, update, sync daemons.

After downloading the image and flashing it onto a sufficiently large SD card (at least 4Gb) via:

unxz susibian-20191105.img.xz
sudo dd if=susibian-20191105.img of=/dev/XXX bs=4M conv=fsync

(note that the device /dev/XXX needs to be adjusted for your SD card reader!), further setup is explained in this document. We are working on improving the documentation!

We hope by liberating the personal assistant market from the privacy-ignorant Google and Amazon forces, users will gain more freedom to choose and freedom to share, and freedom to create!

We are looking forward to feedback and suggestions, improvements, pull request! Please send either issues to one of the git repositories, or join us at one of the gitter channels (susi_hardware, susi_server, susi_android, susi_webclient, or generally at fossasia)!