RequireIoT

I wanted my voice interaction solution to be fairly independent from openHAB, in order to have the option to switch to a different home automation controller in the future. That drove my design decisions in how to couple Rhasspy and openHAB.

The solution also needed to extensible: I expect to add more openHAB items for lights and other gadgets in the future, and I don’t want to have to manually edit lists of expected voice command sentences every time I do that.

I implemented three kinds of voice interaction: voice announcements, voice commands and voice questions and answers.

In addition to voice announcements and voice commands, I also implemented a “dialog” feature, where I can ask for information, and get an answer from the system. Currently, this very limited, I can only ask for the time of day, for temperature and humidity. In /etc/openhab/things/rhasspy.things we have In /etc/openhab/items/rhasspy.items we have in other .items files, I have (the details are not relevant for what I am trying to explain here) In /etc/openhab/rules/rhasspy.rules we have This part is a bit

The bird’s eye view of what has to happen here is: That was the bird’s eye view. And now for the details … How to tell Rhasspy what to expect Whenever I add or edit an openHAB item that should be the subject of a voice interaction, I want the Rhasspy configuration to change automatically, to reflect the change in openHAB. For this purpose, I have defined several openHAB groups: Group name Purpose gVA voice-activated items like light switches that

In this feature, information flows only in one direction: from openHAB to me, no speech recognition involved. How openHAB communicates with the text-to-speech engine Bird’s eye view: to trigger a spoken announcement, openHAB publishes an MQTT message that contains all the relevant information: what to say, and on which satellite to say it. When the message is received by the master Rhasspy service, it converts the text to audio and then streams it to the specified satellite. openHAB talks to

I have several Raspberry Pies around the house, serving as voice interfaces (Rhasspy “satellites”), some of them also as media players using Kodi. They all have a ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT sound card, which contains two microphones and an audio output, connected to a small speaker.