2 in 1: Google Assistant & Amazon Alexa in one Pi

It is hard not to fall in love with Raspberry Pi -these small computers and their capabilities. If you were following my previous posts, I have already been enjoying building my own gadgets with Pi at home.

And now, it is time for a new adventure with voice assistants. I have been trying to experiment with Google voice kit- which is a $5 kit that works with a Raspberry Pi computer. It basically helps to test the voice apps (actions) you develop on Google Developer platform with Google assistant. Yes, actually you can test the actions on your phone or with simulator on web. Yet, having the voice kit can help to deploy custom scripts other than voice assistant itself.

I have created my Google dev account and tested Google Assistant and Action development using guidelines of voice kit and online tutorials. It was a fun journey to getting familiar with voice kit.

Then, I noticed that I can also use Amazon Alexa with this voice kit. That sounds even more interesting to be able to deploy Alexa on Pi. I created Amazon developer account, and again, used tutorials to create a test skill with Alexa.

Creating the developer accounts and getting hands-on is not hard but time consuming process. But worth the price since it is a one-time effort. Then, all you need to do is creating skills/actions and test it.

After I managed to use Alexa in Pi, my ultimate goal become using both assistants together. I did some research and started my attempts to run these rivals in one place. There is one guideline here which I did not follow at this time, but could not find many other explorers like me out there. The fundamental problem I had was giving both assistants the access to microphone. Both want to hold the microphone forever, so whichever is initiated first holds the microphone access. Probably I can solve this issue with an extra microphone, but still managed to get them work consecutively if Alexa starts first, and Google with button initiation starts next. Still need to figure out how to run them together at the same time though. Here is a glimpse from my experiment:

Having both assistants in one place would be useful to ask the question the other if one fails to answer. Other than that, it can be helpful to complete multi platform tasks easily, such as ordering from Amazon but checking your calendar from Google. I will update this post once I figure out to run both together and test different scenarios.