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Seeed Studio’s ReSpeaker – Open Modular Voice Interface in almost any language
2016-09-12 | By Maker.io Staff
The folks at Seeed Studio have done it again! with another phenomenal Kickstarter campaign. The previous KickStarter by Seeed, the RePhone, focussed on the cell phone connectivity using a modular system. This time we see the introduction to voice recognition, the driving mechanism behind popular commercial products such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Personally I really can’t wait to play with the ReSpeaker, I haven’t seen anything like this in the Maker Market and it will be a great addition to some exciting home automation projects. The applications for the ReSpeaker are endless with many possibilities such as a music jukebox, information hub, and much more.
The Core of the ReSpeaker development board is based on Mediatek’s MT7688 WiFi module and runs OpenWrt, which is a popular Linux distribution for embedded devices. The ReSpeaker also has a built-in high performance microphone that can detect your voice over any other ambient noise from across the room. ReSpeaker responds to your voice and recognizes your speech based on powerful online platforms services such as Microsoft Cognitive Service, Amazon Alexa Voice Service, Google Speak API, Wit.ai and Houndify.
The ReSpeaker can be especially useful when hooked up to PocketSphinx with certain audio file libraries. It will enable your ReSpeaker to be available offline, responded to keywords and commands. The ReSpeaker also features a number of programming languages at your disposal including Python, JavaScript, Lua, C/C++ and it also comes with an open SDK for developers.
The ReSpeaker also features an expansion header, which accepts a number of shield-like add-ons that Seeed are producing for the board. Some of the expansion boards will be available through the Kickstarter campaign including a far-field microphone array. This board is based on the 7 XVSM-2000 digital microphones from XMOS. This add-on board is designed to improve the audio interaction experience to help with the acoustic performance overall. The far-field add-on board can do a number of things:
- Hear your voice from far away
- Focus on your voice only
- Improve your voice quality
- Detect direction of your voice
There is also two other expansion board available for the ReSpeaker including a Grove module expansion board to interact with the Grove plug-n-play modules. This add-on board features 10 Grove ports with 3x digital I/O, 4x analog I/O, 2x I2C and 1 UART ports. The second add-on device is a Meow King Drive Unit, which is a 5W portable desktop speaker.
Seeed has always been an Open-source innovation platform for makers and the ReSpeaker is no exception. The ReSpeakers modular design enables hardware-developers alike to fully customize every aspect of the board with limitless possibilities. You can also create your own 3D printed design cases.
The KickStarter Campaign only has a few days left to pre-order your hardware. Seeed are aimed to deliver the ReSpeaker in November 2016. At the time of writing the early bird offers are around $39 with the expected retail price at around $69. The ReSpeaker could be a real game changer in the Maker industry, both the ReSpeaker and cloud services such as Google and Amazon complement each other in what will be a great experience for end users.
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Hong Kong, China