We all know that a Smart Speaker to excel above its competitors has to excel in first being a good “Speaker” and a speaker has a basic and essential feature which is “volume control”. But things get better if you can control your volume with your voice.

So, we have implemented a feature that allows the user to control the volume of the audio with his/her voice.

Below are the steps we had to follow to implement this feature

 

Step 1: Creating the Skills

The skills required to implement the ‘volume-action’ is implemented in the SUSI Server repo itself.

The skill is located in

susi_server/conf/system_skills/general/en/en_0001_foundation.txt

 

And below are the skills required

 

set audio volume to *|set audio volume to * percent|set audio volume to * points|set volume to *|set volume to * percent|set volume to * points !console:Audio volume is now $1$ percent. {“actions”:[ {“type”:“audio_volume”, “volume”:$1$} ]} eol

 

We get the following response from the server

 

“actions”: [      {        “volume”: “80”,        “type”: “audio_volume”      },      {        “type”: “answer”,        “expression”: “Audio volume is now 80 percent.”      }

 

Step 2: Finding Volume Action in the server response

Now that our Server responds to our queries regarding the voice change action , we must implement it in our Smart Speaker Client.

We first create a custom class in our in the SUSI API Wrapper repo which has only one member

 

class VolumeAction(BaseAction):    def __init__(self , volume):        super().__init__()        self.volume = volume

 

We check through the actions in the server’s response

 

elif isinstance(action, VolumeAction):            result[‘volume’] = action.volume

 

Step 3: Implementing it in the client

Now to implement the action in our client we use a library called ‘alsaaudio’ to control the master volume of our RaspberryPi

 

m = alsaaudio.Mixer()                m.setvolume(int(reply[‘volume’]))                os.system(‘play {0} &’.format(self.components.config[‘detection_bell_sound’]))  # nosec #pylint-disable type: ignore                m = alsaaudio.Mixer()                m.setvolume(int(reply[‘volume’]))                os.system(‘play {0} &’.format(self.components.config[‘detection_bell_sound’]))  # nosec #pylint-disable type: ignore

 

Now the user can easily change the speaker using the voice commands

References

• https://pypi.org/project/pyalsaaudio/
• https://github.com/fossasia/susi_server
• https://github.com/fossasia/susi_api_wrapper
• https://github.com/fossasia/susi_linux

 

Tags

GSoC, GSoC’18, SUSI.AI, SUSI Linux, Smart Speaker , SUSI API Wrapper, SUSI Server, FOSSASIA, Volume Action