The weekend was spent on testing out different voice assistants. The setup i had before was to simply have my own text-to-speech where i just checked for certain keywords. Not the best, but it worked. But i wanted to add something like Alexa so i instantly could get way much more functionality without having to program everything on my own. 

So i started out with Alexa, was not that hard to implement a test version from their examples so i could play podcasts and radio and so on and it worked great. It was fast and accurate. However i really wanted Spotify support so i could play my music and podcasts. But it turns out Amazon have disabled these types of applications if you are not developing a public application. 

So i moved on to Mycroft AI that i found had a Spotify Skill, this was a little bit more tricky to get working at first, it was a easy install but the output audio would not play, after some work i finally got it working, it's slower than Alexa, but i read you can do some optimizations and i do really like that it is Open Source, it was really accurate and it seems easy enough to develop my own Skill to do a custom skill to control the robot. So the direction i will be going in will be with Mycroft AI.

Next step is to create the custom skill and to install a speaker, since im just using a Bluetooth speaker right now which is a bit unnecessary, but i have some speakers from an old build of my own bluetooth speaker that i will probably re-use.

You probably get the idea of how a voice assistant work, but here is a demo video anyway, since some content is always nice :) Something is weird with the sound in the demo, because it jumps into the middle of the first sentence. But i think that is some weird problem with my speaker since i don't get that with headphones connected.