For the past month, I’ve worked with a small group at our makerspace MakerHQ on a side project for the Hackaday Sci Fi design contest that is very reminiscent of my Raspberry Pi Bathroom Bot. This time, it’s all the idea of Cara, one of our members who loves Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We set forth with the challenge of building a modern, cyberpunk-ish version of Deep Thought. We wanted a project that utilized local speech recognition, Neopixel strips, and text to speech programs.

With a combination of PocketSphinx and festival, we were able to mock up, rather quickly, our own dark version of Amazon Alexa! I’m hoping to make Deep Thought a regular part of our space and give him some functionality for providing data or control to various aspects of our makerspace. I’ll release the code hopefully in the next few weeks!

For now, to check out our project (including video of me conversing with Deep Thought), check out our Hackaday Project Page.