Snowboy Hotword Detection

by KITT.AI.

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Full Documentation

Version: 1.0.0 (5/10/2016)

Snowboy is a customizable hotword detection engine for you to create your own hotword like "OK Google" or "Alexa". It is powered by deep neural networks and has the following properties:

• highly customizable: you can freely define your own magic phrase here – let it be “open sesame”, “garage door open”, or “hello dreamhouse”, you name it.

• always listening but protects your privacy: Snowboy does not use Internet and does not stream your voice to the cloud.

• light-weight and embedded: it even runs on a Raspberry Pi and consumes less than 10% CPU on the weakest Pi (single-core 700MHz ARMv6).

• Apache licensed!

Currently Snowboy supports:

• all versions of Raspberry Pi (with Raspbian based on Debian Jessie 8.0)
• 64bit Mac OS X
• 64bit Ubuntu (12.04 and 14.04)

It ships in the form of a C library with Python wrappers generated by SWIG. We welcome wrappers for other languages -- feel free to send a pull request!

If you want support on other hardware/OS, please send your request to [email protected]

Dependencies

Snowboy's Python wrapper uses PortAudio to access your device's microphone.

Mac OS X

brew install swig, sox, portaudio and its Python binding pyaudio:

brew install swig portaudio sox
pip install pyaudio

If you don't have Homebrew installed, please download it here. If you don't have pip, you can install it here.

Make sure that you can record audio with your microphone:

rec t.wav

Ubuntu

First apt-get install swig, sox, portaudio and its Python binding pyaudio:

sudo apt-get install swig3.0 python-pyaudio python3-pyaudio sox
pip install pyaudio

Then install the atlas matrix computing library:

sudo apt-get install libatlas-base-dev

Make sure that you can record audio with your microphone:

rec t.wav

If you need extra setup on your audio (especially on a Raspberry Pi), please see the full documentation.

Compile a Python Wrapper

cd swig/python
make

SWIG will generate a _snowboydetect.so file and a simple (but hard-to-read) python wrapper snowboydetect.py. We have provided a higher level python wrapper snowboydecoder.py on top of that.

Feel free to adapt the Makefile in swig/python to your own system's setting if you cannot make it.

Quick Start

Go to the swig/python folder and open your python console:

In [1]: import snowboydecoder

In [2]: def detected_callback():
   ....:     print "hotword detected"
   ....:

In [3]: detector = snowboydecoder.HotwordDetector("resources/snowboy.umdl", sensitivity=0.5, audio_gain=1)

In [4]: detector.start(detected_callback)

Then speak "snowboy" to your microphone to see whetheer Snowboy detects you.

The snowboy.umdl file is a "universal" model that detect different people speaking "snowboy". If you want other hotwords, please go to snowboy.kitt.ai to record, train and downloand your own personal model (a .pmdl file).

When sensitiviy is higher, the hotword gets more easily triggered. But you might get more false alarms.

audio_gain controls whether to increase (>1) or decrease (<1) input volume.

Two demo files demo.py and demo2.py are provided to show more usages.

Note: if you see the following error:

TypeError: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'model_str'

You are probably using an old version of SWIG. Please upgrade. We have tested with SWIG version 3.0.7 and 3.0.8.

Advanced Usages & Demos

See Full Documentation.

Change Log

5/10/2016

• initial release