marcel

a bot which listens and says non sense in several languages

Current state

Marcel listens to you in French or in English but answers in English. To do so, he is able to use Sphinx (offline) or Google voice API (but there is a bug described for Google voice in lib, so for now Sphinx is the only option).

Once all the dependencies installed (easy on a raspberry, more dependencies on other distro, see bellow) Marcel will install French automatically.

Marcel is made of several utility classes used to listen, talk and understand: Brain, ear, mouth classes. You can easily write modules and use these classes to automate your life or have as much fun with Marcel as I do, see the modules in this folder, each .js file in this folder is loaded as a module and describes itself.

Marcel's config is in his package.json

Install and start

You need to install nodejs and npm:

$ wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v8.9.0/node-v8.9.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf node-v8.9.0-linux-armv6l.tar.gz
$ cd node-v8.9.0-linux-armv6l/
$ sudo cp -R * /usr/local/
$ node -v
v8.9.0
$ npm -v
5.5.1

python

on fedora, you will need to upgrade to python3 and have these dependencies

$ sudo dnf install python3-devel && pip3 install --force-reinstall --upgrade pip
$ sudo dnf install portaudio-devel
$ sudo dnf install swig
$ pip install pocketsphinx
$ pip install SpeechRecognition
$ pip install PyAudio

speak

on fedora

$ sudo dnf install alsa-lib-devel
$ pip install SpeechRecognition

on a raspberry:

$ sudo apt-get install -y gcc libasound2 libasound2-dev mpg321 python-dev bison portaudio19-dev
$ sudo apt-get install -y wget unzip # this is for install-french script
$ sudo apt-get install -y libpulse-dev # this is for pocketshpinx
$ sudo apt-get remove python-pip # comes from jasper install
$ sudo easy_install pip # comes from jasper install
$ sudo apt-get install festival festvox-kallpc16k # for speech, needs reboot
$ sudo apt-get install -y swig
$ sudo apt-get install -y sox # for clap detection
$ pip install pocketsphinx
$ pip install SpeechRecognition
$ pip install PyAudio

Then reboot.

This can be useful, comes from Jasper install instructions

• Plug in your USB microphone. Let’s create an ALSA configuration file /lib/modprobe.d/marcel.conf and paste this into it:

# Load USB audio before the internal soundcard
options snd_usb_audio index=0
options snd_bcm2835 index=1

# Make sure the sound cards are ordered the correct way in ALSA
options snd slots=snd_usb_audio,snd_bcm2835

• restart your Pi
• test recording with arecord temp.wav
• Make sure you have speakers or headphones connected to the audio jack of your Pi. You can play back the recorded file: aplay -D hw:1,0 temp.wav

ready to start Marcel

$ npm i
$ npm start

The instructions bellow are optional

listen

See here how to install other languages

If you want to use google instead of Sphinx, you will need to edit package.json config and install google-api-python-client like this:

$ pip install google-api-python-client

Also create an app in google cloud platform, activate the speech API and create a service account key, which will give you a json file. Put the json file as key.json at the root of Marcel's directory.

notes

Needs pocketsphinx installed and configured, which is not an easy task.

Specific to raspberry:

• Configuring ALSA Audio output on Analog and HDMI of Raspberry Pi
• the instructions for raspberry pi
• find the missing file alsa-base.conf (use the comment about /lib/modprobe.d/aliases.conf)
• this post about trouble shooting mic/audio and this one too

Use this tool to chose words to be recognized (optional but much more efficient)

• http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/tools/lmtool-new.html
• also see http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/models/

Here are foreign language packs: http://www.politepix.com/languages

Convert *.lm.dmp to *.lm (very slow) (from this tutorial)

sphinx_lm_convert -i ../fr/fr.lm.dmp -ifmt bin -o ../fr/model.lm -ofmt arpa

Convert to .bin (quicker to start)

sphinx_lm_convert -i model.lm -o model.lm.bin

road map

• activate between "marcel" and "shut up marcel"
• switch between languages
• repeat mode
• record / play sound
• play radio
• give the time, set timer
• search duckduckgo instant answers