“A ‘holographic’ voice assistant for Home Assistant with a twist in the hips
This is an offline visual voice assistant that connects via MQTT to any domotica system that supports MQTT. I use it to control my Home Assistant system. With over 90 animations and 150 possible commands it will suite most tasks.
Will there are more capable voice assistant those are not working offline and aren’t that visual appealing. To overcome this I decided to make my own voice assistant. May I present you this Ghost Pepper voice Assistant.
How does it work?
The heart of this device is a ESP32 and a AI Thinker VC-02 voice and speech module. After a wake word the voice module signals the ESP with a code and that will start an animation. Based on the voice command the animations changes till you are finished. The ESP sends out the selected command via MQTT to Home Assistant (HA) in my case. There an automation will start based on the received code and additional commands are send back to start a different animation. The animations are loaded from a SD card and displayed on a screen. This image is reflected on a transparent sheet of plastic, hence the Ghost pepper in the name. There is an additional touch button that can signal HA without activating the voice assistant.”