Snips.ai

Snips.ai is an AI-powered voice assistant that runs on the Raspberry Pi 3 and x86 platforms. It runs on-device and is Private by Design.

To get started, follow their tutorial to create an assistant and download the training data.

Now install and activate the Samba add-on so you can upload your training data. Connect to the “share” Samba share and copy your training data over. Name the file assistant.zip.

Now it’s time to start Snips for the first time. When the Snips add-on starts, it will output your audio devices:

**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 0: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA]
  Subdevices: 8/8
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
  Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
  Subdevice #2: subdevice #2
  Subdevice #3: subdevice #3
  Subdevice #4: subdevice #4
  Subdevice #5: subdevice #5
  Subdevice #6: subdevice #6
  Subdevice #7: subdevice #7
card 0: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 1: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 IEC958/HDMI]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

You need to use this information to point the add-on at the right speakers and microphone. The information describes different cards and devices. On a Raspberry Pi 3, card 0 - device 0 is the built-in headset port, card 0 - device 1 is the HDMI port. In the example above, the USB microphone showed up as card 1 - device 0.

Find the microphone and speakers that you want to use and note down their device and card number. We will need that to configure the add-on options mic (microphone to use) and speaker (speaker to use). The format for these options is <card #>,<device #>. Change the configuration options and click save.

Now start the add-on.

Add-On configuration

{
  "mic": "1,0",
  "speaker": "1,0",
  "assistant": "assistant.zip",
  "mqtt_bridge": {
    "active": true,
    "host": "172.17.0.1",
    "port": 1883,
    "user": "",
    "password": ""
  },
}

Configuration variables:

• mqtt_bridge (Optional): Snips uses MQTT to communicate and defaults to their own broker. Use this config option to bridge their broker to your own.
• mic: This is the hardware address of your microphone. Look at the Snips

Home Assistant configuration

Use the Home Assistant Snips.ai component to integrate the add-on into Home Assistant.

snips: