Setting up Mycroft AI (Mark II Enhanced DevKit) in german with local Coqui TTS instance

That’s just a quick writing on how i setup my Mycroft Mark II DevKit voice assistant with german setup with local TTS based on Coqui.

This document is work in progress and will be constantly updated when i continue configuring my Mycroft Mark II DevKit.

Due Mycroft and Coqui projects are under really active development steps can easily change in (near) future, but for now (05.05.2021) these steps worked for my setup.

First build Mycroft Mark II Enhanced DevKit

Mycroft AI published a nice step by step documentation here.

Assembly of my Mark II DevKit unit

After putting together all components i installed the Mycroft image on USB drive and bootet up the device.

Note to myself: Check right cable direction for display (thx to Mycroft community)!

After the device has been booted and registered on home.mycroft.ai i enabled SSH login as described here.

Setting system stuff for german language / timezone

Mycroft is not completely translated to other languages than english.

1. sudo timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Berlin
2. <TODO>

Adjust Mycroft config for german language

Before starting with configuration you’ve to login using SSH on port 8222 with public key auth.

To not struggle with config files i used mycroft-config command line tool for configuration.

Running “mycroft-config get” shows a list of all configured parameters.

mycroft-config set lang “de-de”
mycroft-config set date_format “DMY”
mycroft-config set location.city.code “”
mycroft-config set location.city.name “your city”
mycroft-config set location.city.state.code “DEnn”
mycroft-config set location.city.state.name “Bundesland”
mycroft-config set location.city.state.country.code “DE”
mycroft-config set location.city.state.country.name “Germany”
mycroft-config set location.coordinates.latitude “<your location>”
mycroft-config set location.coordinates.longitude “<your location>”
mycroft-config set location.coordinates.timezone.code “Europe/Berlin”
mycroft-config set location.coordinates.timezone.name “Europe/Berlin”
mycroft-config set tts.module “mozilla”
mycroft-config set tts.mozilla.url “http://<ip>:5002

Setup Coqui TTS

It’s useful to enable CUDA (GPU) support for performance reasons if it’s available.

If interested in Coqui TTS please README and docs available on their github. I’ll just point out needed steps i did to get TTS up and running.

1. mkdir <tts-dir>
2. cd <tts-dir>
3. python3 -m venv .
4. source ./bin/activate
5. pip3 install -U pip wheel setuptools tts
6. tts-server — model_name <<TODO>> (right now my Fullband-MelGAN vocoder training is running — this has a nice RTF for use within Mycroft. Hopefully i can release this model by the end of june 2021)

When you’re done with these steps open your browser (http://<ip>:5002) and check if simple webfront is responding and speech generation is possible

That’s all for now folks. I will continue writing when i go back to Mark II DevKit configuration.