Analysis of Mycroft and Rhasspy Open Source voice assistants

Abstract

Technological advances in recent years have made machines and intelligent devices made accessible by voice control to the average user. More and more voice assistants are being offered in the market. It is necessary to analyse them to see what advantages and disadvantages each one has in order to identify which one is more convenient for each specific user. The most popular voice assistants follow the same approach of accessing the users' data to facilitate and improve the product development, and on the other hand, get an additional benefit from the handling of this data. The emergence of alternatives with different approaches has shown that it is possible to have quality alternatives with a different focus. Analysing the different Open Source options in the market, the Mycroft and Rhasspy systems have been selected for further analysis due to the characteristics they present. They are two alternatives that offer a series of advantages related to privacy and accessibility that are not offered by the big players in the market. While Mycroft focuses on a system that works in the cloud but allows the user to have control over their data, Rhasspy proposes the use of a system that works entirely locally. The use of these assistants with an openHAB server has allowed the development of a very interesting system. The openHAB server acts as an intermediate platform between voice assistants and intelligent devices. This makes possible to create a system that allows to control all these devices of the home by voice. It has been seen that these systems allow a very simple configuration. At the same time is obtained a very optimum performance in relation to the detection of commands and their subsequent execution.