Raspberry Pi Robot (RaPiRo)

Ok, after spending almost a month doing many things not related to Raspberry Pi and home automation, I wish to  show one of the latest projects about RPi: RaPiRo (contraction of Raspberry Pi Robot).

This is a really nice small robot that can be 3d printed at home without too much trouble (if you wish you can also buy the full kit, but it will cost you much more).

By printing the shell and using many parts I had at home, I got this nice item at a really low cost.

But you may ask what this robot has to do with home automation.... Well, let's se how it could be used.

Send vocal message using TTS and Yowsup

Last time we saw how to install PicoTTS to make our Raspberry Pi speak. Using PicoTTS (or any other Text To Speech engine you like) and the Yowsup class to send media files that we already used for pictures, we will be able to send vocal messages from the RPi, instead of just text answers.

In the future, if Whatsapp will really enable audio calls (and Yowsup will support them), it would be possible to integrate also a vocal recognition module, so we could ask something to the RPi directly, with just a call and hear the answer.

What a wonderful task from such a small device!

Installing Pico TTS

Sooner or later you may wish to hear your Raspberry Pi speaking.

It's nice to get messages from your RPi by Whatsapp, or reading on a small display (or TV), but hearing this device answering you with a real voice could be amazing!

There are several TTS (Text To Speech) engines avaliable for a Raspberry Pi and you can find a list here.

Usually offline engines suffer from low quality voices (and sometimes limited languages avaliable). On the opposite side, online TTS engines could have really high speech quality, but you need an internet connection (and your recorded voice will be analyzed from someone else).