Dipping my toes in the Rhasspy pool

I’ve seen Rhasspy popping up a lot lately so I thought I’d check it out. I had Snips running well sort of. I never got it responding properly but with Home Assistant and MQTT I was able to turn off the lights, and play (also stop, volume +/-) some radio streams to my Chromecast Audio.

After Snips was shutdown I moved to Mycroft. After my battle trying to get Snips working Mycroft was up and running quickly.
I am not overly impressed with it though. I had to get a Pi 3B+ to run it as there was no local server option so now my Pi Zero W is doing nothing.
I’ve found that my wife’s, and my kid’s voices are not detected. The pitch is too high? The solution was to train Mycroft with their voices, that’s not going to happen.
I was impressed with the ease of adding new skills, and the range of skills. I was not impressed with the lack of standards, particularly around the word ‘Play’

So now I’m looking at Rhasspy. I’m impressed with what I see but I do have a few questions.

  1. Do skills exist? and if so how are they added?
  2. Can I control Mopidy?
  3. Can I control (activate/deactivate) Snapcast clients?
  4. Can I play music from my Rhasspy device (snapcast cleint) and still have 'Hey Rhasspy" work? or would I need a separate snapcast client?
  5. If I setup multiple satellites will the server respond to the correct one?
  6. Can I run Rhasspy and Retro Pi on a Pi 3b+?

I think that’s about it

Welcome Rob, I remember your avatar from my time on the Snips forum :slight_smile:

I can answer two of your questions, I’ll let others answer the rest:

Rhasspy doesn’t have a nice “app store” yet like Snips had or Mycroft has. There’s some discussion about it, but it’s currently a bit early.

But there are a lot of ways to create your own apps, for instance:

  • as a Node-RED flow
  • as Python code using the Hermes protocol or WebSocket
  • in any other programming language using the Hermes protocol or WebSocket

To make creating Python apps for Rhasspy easier, I started rhasspy-hermes-app, which is the spiritual successor of SnipsKit, which you maybe remember. Others are working on skill/app libraries too, I have collected some resources in my GitHub repository awesome-rhasspy.

Yes, Rhasspy supports the site ID parameter of the Hermes protocol. You can find instructions in the documentation. Many users here have such a setup, with Raspberry Pis (even Zeros) as satellites.

With Home Assistant automations / intent scripts or Node-Red you can control almost anything that they can control.

You can freely decide where you want to echo your voice output, including the originating satellite.

I can confirm Pi33B+ as master and Pi Zero W as satellites working great.

I also came from Snips and find rhasspy is much better after getting used to it and better to control.

You might want to check my HA / Node-Red example:

Recently there were also a lot of good discussions of settings for different hardware / mics (i.e. here Pi-zero+Jabra : need help to improve snowboy performance)…you will find anything here to get started I think and if not this community is not the biggest yet it seems to me but very responsive and helpful.

Thank you for the answers. I’m happy to hear there is movement towards an ‘app store’.

I don’t think I ever got into Snips programming, I just did the basic skill with intents and then lets Node-Red/Home Assistant action the intents and provide the vocal response. When it comes to programming I can’t fight my way out of a wet paper bag.

Thanks for the info.

I’ll definitely check out the example you shared.

Until today with Snips and now rhasspy I never saw the need for apps. At Snips most apps where not usable for me as I had to adjust my HA to it. So I was always going my own way with Intents and scripts and now Node-Red.

But maybe some they an app will apear that changes my mind :smiley: But as HA can control almost everything in my house I think I will stick to using the voice assistant as another input device for Home Assistant.

I never did get any Snips ‘apps’ working but in my brief experiment with Mycroft I came to like the ‘apps’.
Being able to deploy an app that allowed me to get information from Wikipedia, set a timer, or quiz my kids on math.
While nothing ground breaking there were fun to have.