MATRIX Voice Google Assistant – MATRIX Voice Project

In the last post, we build a Robot that can be controlled via Amazon Alexa using MATRIX Voice installed in a Raspberry Pi. In this tutorial, we will install and setup MATRIX Voice Google Assistant. Yes Google Assistant using your own MATRIX Device and Raspberry Pi.

MATRIX Voice Google Assistant Demo Video

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Sponsor Link

This Project is Sponsored by UTSource. UTSource is a professional electronic components supplier.

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MATRIX Voice Google Assistant

Components Needed

• MATRIX Voice / Creator
• Raspberry Pi 3 (Click to Purchase)
• Speaker (Click to Purchase)
• Micro SD Card (Click to Purchase)
• Active Internet Connection

Prerequisites

Before starting the set up of MATRIX Voice Google Assistant it would be good if you know a little bit about the components and boards used in this project. You can either read it or just start the tutorial section. Let us get familiarized.

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is small credit card sized, light weight and compact computer available which is used by both professions, hobbyist and of course hackers alike. This mini computer can do (almost) any thing a normal linux machine can do. It is widely used in various industries, robotics, home automation projects.

MATRIX Voice

This little development board consist of a radial array of 8 MEMS microphones, 18 RGBW LED’s and 64 GPIO pins, which is linked to a Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA and 64 Mbit SDRAM. This provides the hobbyists and developers a wonderful opportunity to add custom voice and hardware-accelerated machine learning technology In no time. An advanced version of this MATRIX Voice is also available employing a ESP32 Wi-Fi / BT chipset which will enable users to easily connect to the network or other devices via WiFi and Bluetooth in no time.

MATRIX Voice Google Assistant Tutorial

Step 1 : Setting Up Raspberry Pi

Download and burn latest Raspbian image to a micro SD card and insert it into the raspberry Pi. Now power it up with a power adapter that can provide at least 2.5 Ampere. Now fire up your terminal and create a password for the user ‘pi’ by executing the command

sudo passwd pi

Connect your Raspberry Pi to a WiFi router or Wired network and make sure it is connected by checking whether it is getting an IP address from the switch. Now perform and update and upgrade by running

sudo apt update -y 
sudo apt upgrade -y

Step 2 : Adding the Repositories

In order to set up Google Assistant in your MATRIX Voice, you should start by installing the right tools. First we will install the MATRIX Software by adding the right repositories. Enter the below commands to install MATRIX Software

curl https://apt.matrix.one/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://apt.matrix.one/raspbian $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/matrixlabs.list

Once you have added the repositories, you can perform an update and an upgrade by running

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 3 : Install MATRIX Packages and Kernel Modules

Now you can install the MATRIX Softwares

sudo apt install matrixio-creator-init

Install Kernel headers by running

sudo apt install raspberrypi-kernel-headers raspberrypi-kernel git

Once this step is complete, you should do a reboot for effects to take place.

sudo reboot

Now you can install kernel modules by running

sudo apt install matrixio-kernel-modules

Reboot the Pi

sudo reboot

Step 4 : Create a Google Developer Project

Now use your google account to create a Google Developer project. This step  will give your device access to the Google Assistant API. You can do this by following the below steps

1.  Navigate to Actions Console Page – Go to the Actions Console
2. Select Add/import project.
3. Create a new project,Give your project a project name in the Project name box and click on CREATE PROJECT.
4. Now you have your project ready. Next thing to do is enabling the API. Go to the Cloud Platform Console and Enable the Google Assistant API in the project you just created.Click Enable.
5. For proper working of our Google Assistant, you should share some activity data with Google. To do that, open the Activity Controls page from the account that is linked with google assistant.

Enable the Following Switches

• Web & App Activity
  • Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services checkbox.
• Device Information
• Voice & Audio Activity

Step 5 : Register the Device

1. Go to Actions Console and select the project you created on the upper part of the screen.
2. From the left navigation bar, click on the Connected properties.
3. Click on the DEVICE MODELS tab and Click on the REGISTER MODEL button.

Fill up all the information and Click REGISTER MODEL. when you are finished Download credentials.json file to your computer and place it in your Raspberry Pi in which MATRIX Voice Google Assistant will be running. It is recomended not to rename this file and keep it under /home/pi folder. Download this file and transfer it to the device. Click NEXT.

Step 6 : Installing the SDK

Before installing the SDK, it will be a smarter move to isolate system packages from packages that we are about to install. For that, we will set up a virtual environment for us to tinker with. Note: Run these codes from /home/pi directory otherwise it wont work. Setup Python Virtyual Environment using the following commands

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-dev python3-venv
python3 -m venv env
env/bin/python -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel
source env/bin/activate

Install the dependencies:

sudo apt-get install portaudio19-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev

Install python packages to our virtual environment using the below commands

python -m pip install --upgrade google-assistant-library
python -m pip install --upgrade google-assistant-sdk[samples]
python -m pip install --upgrade google-auth-oauthlib[tool]

Now its time to generate the credentials which we be using to run our Generate credentials to be able to run our MATRIX Voice Google Assistant. Run the below command.

google-oauthlib-tool --scope https://www.googleapis.com/auth/assistant-sdk-prototype 
          --save --headless --client-secrets /path/to/credentials.json

If everything is done correctly, you should see a URL displayed in the terminal some what like this:

Please visit this URL to authorize this application: https://...
Enter the authorization code:

Now all you have to do is copy the entire URL, open up a browser and paste the URL in the address bar and hit enter. It will ask you to login to the Google Account that is linked with the developer project and as you for your approval. Once you approve the request, you will be provided with a Key. Copy the key and Paste it in the Terminal. If everything went well, you should see something like this in the Terminal.

credentials saved: /path/to/.config/google-oauthlib-tool/credentials.json

Step 6 : Get MATRIX Code For Google Assistant

MATRIX labs have customized code that allows us to integrate MATRIX Everloop with Google Assistant. Clone the Repository using the below command[AdSense-C]

git clone https://github.com/matrix-io/google-assistant-matrixio.git

Start your MATRIX Voice Google Assistant

Your MATRIX Voice Google Assistant is now ready. Start it by running

~/google-assistant-matrixio/google-matrixio-assistant-hotword --project_id your-dev-project-id --device_model_id your-model-id

Now you can interact with your MATRIX Voice Google Assistant. Try asking the usual question – Hey Google, Whats the time now? Hey Google, How is the weather outside? If you have any doubts, please feel free to open a topic and ask it in our forum.[ Rate the Project Did you find this page useful? Help us to improve by rating this page. [RICH_REVIEWS_FORM] [RICH_REVIEWS_SNIPPET stars_only=”true”] AdSense-B]