Work & Kids at home? Geek out together!
My kids talk in Dutch to a Salesforce Einstein Chatbot. it is not perfect, but it sure is a lot of fun!
As a lot of people around the world at the moment I’m working from home, and the schools are closed. Because the fun part of my job at Salesforce is creating fun and (hopefully) valuable ideas around bots and automation I decided to test it out on my kids for the use-cases: ‘What’s for dinner tonight?’, ‘what are we going to do tomorrow?’.
Now these are valid questions, and the easiest and best solution is to have a paper calendar on the wall.
So obviously I built an Einstein Chatbot and voice enabled it with a Raspberry pi, google speech and on-device hotword detection.
All the parts
As I’ve just managed to create a working first version this is not a step-by-step instruction but the building blocks I used are:
Snowboy hotword detection
Snowboy is an open-source on-device hotword detection, it keeps the microphone open, listens for the hotwords and then starts the speech recognition. It’s free for personal use and it has online model generation!
On hotword activation it will stream audio input to Google Speech, which returns the transcription. Kids voices are a challenge, but it has a lot of parameters and metadata options to fine-tune.
Why use an enterprise Customer Service bot to answer my kids’ questions? Because the bot builder is awesome, built in NLP is amazing and it has open APIs to connect. Also: free developer edition, perfect for the use-case! Also, big part of my job is building sales demos with them, so I might be biased.
Results
So far we had lots of fun training the snowboy hotword algorithm by shouting ‘Robots’, ‘Einstein’, ‘Papa Robot’ at the pi. My son is disappointed it doesn’t actually prepare the cornflakes for him, but is very excited about building out parts of the bot himself.
Most important, now when they ask what is for dinner I can just tell them to ask the bot.
