MATRIX Voice – Open Source Voice Platform for all

2017-03-28 | By Maker.io Staff

MATRIX Labs, the creators of the "MATRIX Creator", have developed an open-source voice platform for the Raspberry Pi and possibly compatible with other single board computers such as the UP board, the MATRIX Voice. The release of this board through popular crowd funding platform Indiegogo reiterates the growing demand for voice enabled control over our IoT smart devices.

Current voice enabled services are generally fairly limited to their proprietary hardware such as Amazon Alexa for the Amazon Echo devices. This presents a challenge for the voice enabled market to grow. The MATRIX Voice was built to give every maker and developer a complete, affordable, user-friendly tool for IoT voice application development.

At the heart of the board is a Xilinix Spartan 6 FPGA with 64 Mbit of SDRAM and features 7 microphones. Like many other similar voice controlled boards it also has an array of RGB LEDs and includes up to 64 GPIO pins for expansion. In the example given below the MATRIX voice uses the Alexa Voice Services much like the Amazon Echo and works over a great distance.

Matrix Voice Features

The board itself can be connected to a Raspberry Pi or as a stand-alone device with the ESP32 microcontroller version. The MATRIX Voice allows users to connect to a number of voice enabled service APIs including Microsoft Cognitive Service, Amazon Alexa, Google Speech, Wit.ai and Houndify.

MATRIX Voice Connectivity

The MATRIX Voice creators have also made things easy for developers by including their own MATRIX OS on the board, which allows developers to build hardware applications for the board only using a few lines of code in JavaScript. Not only does the board use services to detect speech but also different sounds round your environment such as when your pets make noise in the room you could trigger an event.

Not only can you program the MATRIX voice in JavaScript but it is also available in the popular programming language Python and C++. You can also trigger events using the IFTTT service, which is very popular amongst makers. As an advanced programmer you also gain full access to the FPGA allowing you to manipulate the code and libraries.

MATRIX Voice Programming Languages

Summary

This board is very similar to that of the SeeedStudio ReSpeaker with the addition of using the Spartan 6 FPGA. Voice enabled devices are ever becoming popular fuelled by the IoT industry and smart devices around the home. This is a great addition for maker professionals, a tool that can bridge the gap between everyday IoT devices becoming smart voice enabled devices. I’m sure these types of dev boards will become more popular with more popping up throughout 2017 and beyond. The only drawback is that every device or service cannot interconnect with one another without the use of third party software, it would be much easier if there was a standard for devices to communicate with each other seamlessly. Some of the big players in the market are already implementing this through the OCF but there are also many that are not.

The Matrix Labs Indiegogo campaign still has a number of days left so do not hesitate to back this project and get started creating your very own voice applications.

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Arduino | 3D Printing | Raspberry Pi

MATRIX Voice – Open Source Voice Platform for all

2017-03-28 | By Maker.io Staff

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