Building a voice-controlled home sound system using Snips and Sonos, Part 2: customisation with your own music

by Alice Coucke, Michael Fester, and Alaa Saade

This post is the second part of a previous post published recently on Medium.

Important: Sonos has recently updated their API, breaking some Spotify playback features used here. We are working on a fix, and will update the article accordingly. Stay tuned by joining our Discord community!

If you have gone through Part 1 of this post, you should now be able to run a Music Player assistant using the Snips Voice Platform on a Raspberry Pi 3 to control a Sonos speaker — if you haven’t, please do so before going further. You can therefore play from Spotify and TuneIn without any data ever leaving the device, so that no one, including Snips can ever access it.

We are now going to customise your Snips music voice assistant so that it knows your personal playlists, favorite artists and songs. This will allow you to play them on your Sonos speaker using voice. Just follow these three steps:

Clone the Sonos Snips Skill repository

We call the piece of code that does an action based on the output of the Snips voice platform a skill. The skill that handles the interaction between Snips and both Spotify and Sonos is available in this repo. In order to clone it locally, issue the following commands in a terminal on your computer (there is no need to do this on a raspberry pi)

$ git clone git@github.com:snipsco/snips-skill-sonos.git

Preferably, create a virtual environment in the repository (optional)

$ cd snips-skill-sonos
$ virtualenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

Finally, install the required packages (from inside the folder)

$ pip install .

Get your playlists, favorite artists and songs

We have included a convenience script to make this step very easy. All you have to do is issue the following command

$ python get_spotify_user_data.py XXXXX artists.txt tracks.txt playlists.txt

where XXXXX is your Spotify refresh token which you can get from this app, as explained in more details in this previous post. The previous command will create three files (artists.txt, tracks.txt and playlists.txt) containing respectively your favorite artists and tracks as evaluated by Spotify, and the complete list of your playlists. Now let's teach your assistant about them!

Customising your assistant

Head to the Snips console and open your Sonos assistant. We will fork the Music Player bundle in order to customise it. This is done by clicking on the bottom right corner of the bundle and then selecting Fork.

Click Yes, Fork in the dialog box that opens. You can now copy intents and start editing them. Let us start with the playArtist intent. Click on the copy icon next to the trash one, as shown on the picture below

Once you have done that, you will be able to access the detail of the intent. Open by clicking on it (it may have moved to the bottom of the intents list). You should get to the following screen

In the slot dashboard, click on artist_name to edit the slot type. You will then have access to a table of values that this slot can take. Extending it is very easy. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and find the Import button

Click on it, and copy paste the content of your artists.txt file in the dialog box.

Click on import, and once the import is done, close the slot type page. Don’t forget to save your assistant. You can go back to the slot type edition menu at any time to manually add new artists or remove obsolete ones.

You can now repeat exactly the same steps to customise your playlists (by editing the playlist_name slot in the playPlaylist intent) and your tracks (by editing the song_name slot in the playSong intent).

Once you are done, don’t forget to save your assistant, which will trigger a retraining of the Natural Language Understanding engine. Once this is done, hit Download Assistant. The final adaptation then takes place, adding to the Speech Recognition engine the new entities that we've just imported.

Once you have downloaded the assistant archive, follow the instructions here to update your assistant on the Raspberry Pi.

That’s it, you’re all set! Your assistant should now understand your wildest tastes in music and your most creative playlists names! Make sure to join our Discord community, where you can also find more ideas of what you can create with Snips!

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