askbob 0.0.2

A customisable, federated, privacy-safe voice assistant deployable on low-power devices.

AskBob

AskBob is an easily customisable, completely federated voice assistant deployable on low-power devices.

Docker (for use as a server only)

If you are only using Ask Bob as a server (headlessly), then you can do this using Docker with the Dockerfile provided.

Installation

Build the container using the following command:

$ docker build -t askbob .

You can specify a config.json file in the same directory as this README.md file to train off using a docker build argument as in the following command:

$ docker build --build-arg ASKBOB_SETUP_CONFIG=default_config.json -t askbob .

Usage

The Ask Bob server can then be launched using the following command:

$ docker run -it --rm -p 8000:8000 askbob

Local use (for interactive and server modes of use)

Installation

First, ensure you have Python 3.7 and pip installed on your system. Pip may be installed using the following command:

$ curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py | sudo python3.7

On Linux, you must ensure you have the right Python dev package installed, e.g. python3.7-dev on Ubuntu.

Next, ensure that your versions of pip, setuptools and wheel are up to date.

$ python -m pip install -U pip setuptools wheel

Dependencies shared across all Ask Bob utilisation modes (interactively or as a REST API server) may then be installed by running the follwoing commands:

$ python -m pip install -r requirements/common.txt
$ python -m spacy download en_core_web_md
$ python -m spacy link en_core_web_md en

If you want to use the voice assistant interactively (i.e. with speech transcription and synthesis enabled), you must have a portaudio binary installed.

On Ubuntu, this can be done with the following command:

$ sudo apt install portaudio19-dev python3-pyaudio

On Windows, you may have to compile the portaudio binary used by Ask Bob from source.

Note: Christoph Gohlke maintains unofficial Windows binaries for Python extension packages, including for PyAudio, which may be installed using pip install INSERT_BINARY_LOCATION.

With all these requirements satisfied, you may proceed by installing Ask Bob's voice-related dependencies with the following command:

$ python -m pip install -r requirements/voice.txt

Note: if you get an ImportError related to _portaudio, then you may have to additionally run the following commands (assuming you have git installed):

$ git clone https://people.csail.mit.edu/hubert/git/pyaudio.git
$ cd pyaudio
$ sudo python setup.py install

With portaudio properly installed, you will then need to find a mozilla\DeepSpeech-compatible model and scorer to be used with AskBob. Once downloaded, place the files in the data folder and update the runtime configuration file (config.ini) with the correct file names.

You may also have to modify the configuration depending on the voices available on your system, which may be found using the following sequence of Python commands:

>>> import pyttsx3
>>> print(*[voice.id for voice in pyttsx3.init().getProperty('voices')])
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech\Voices\Tokens\TTS_MS_EN-US_DAVID_11.0 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech\Voices\Tokens\TTS_MS_EN-GB_HAZEL_11.0 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Speech\Voices\Tokens\TTS_MS_EN-US_ZIRA_11.0

Training

The Ask Bob voice assistant must be trained before use (this is done automatically when building the Docker container). This may be done using the following command:

$ python -m askbob --setup [optional additional configuration JSON file]

Ask Bob will train off installed plugins only if no additional configuration JSON file is provided.

The following command is an example of how Ask Bob could be trained:

$ python -m askbob --setup default_config.json

Usage

Ask Bob may be run interactively with the following command:

$ python -m askbob

You can specify your own runtime config.ini file with the -c flag:

$ python -m askbob -c config.ini

AskBob can also be run as a server with the following command:

$ python -m askbob -s

Further help is available using the --help flag.

$ python -m askbob --help
usage: __main__.py [-h] [-c CONFIG] [-w SAVEPATH] [-f FILE] [-d DEVICE]
                   [-r RATE] [-s] [--setup [SETUP]]

Ask Bob: a customisable voice assistant.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -c CONFIG, --config CONFIG
                        The configuration file.
  -w SAVEPATH, --savepath SAVEPATH
                        Save .wav files of utterences to a given directory.
  -f FILE, --file FILE  Read from a .wav file instead of the microphone.
  -d DEVICE, --device DEVICE
                        The device input index (int) as given by
                        pyaudio.PyAudio.get_device_info_by_index(). Default:
                        pyaudio.PyAudio.get_default_device().
  -r RATE, --rate RATE  The input device sample rate (your device might
                        require 44100Hz). Default: 16000.
  -s, --serve           Run Ask Bob as a server instead of interactively.
  --setup [SETUP]       Setup Ask Bob from the configuration JSON file
                        provided and those from installed plugins.

Tests

Tests may be run with the following command:

$ python -m pytest