Speech Recognition Using the Raspberry Pi 74
aonsquared writes "In a previous Slashdot story, I demonstrated a voice-controlled robotic arm using the open-source speech decoder Julius. This time, I have managed to port the system to a Raspberry Pi to control the same robotic arm, and as usual, posted the tutorial and source code. Some negative reviews of the Raspberry Pi are starting to appear, and they're missing the educational point of this device — I'm hoping this will counter the naysayers, and help inspire a new generation of hackers, as well as also bring open-source speech recognition the same attention as proprietary solutions (i.e Siri) are getting!"
Re:Engadget review negative? (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't consider the Engadget review to be negative. They tried to use the board for things it wasn't designed to do (like play Youtube or Flash videos), and it failed to do so. Big deal. The people who are actually trying to buy these boards would likely know better.
The reviewer didn't seem to have a clue what they were doing... they complained about having to type in the startx command to start the GUI, for pete's sake. If anything, the review did a better job of making Engadget look bad than the product they were reviewing.
That said, it's easy to think of negative things to say about the Pi... like the lack of supply. I've been on the waiting list for one for over a month now, and I haven't even been given an estimated shipping date at this point.
"They tried to use the board for things it wasn't designed to do"
Funny that you say that
What’s a Raspberry Pi?
It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs [raspberrypi.org]
Re:CPU (Score:4, Informative)
No. It'd raise the price up past where they're at right now. A dual-core config with a similar sweetheart deal on the SoC's is available as the Pandaboard- and it's priced at $179- there's a hint in that that MANY are missing, especially the reviewers without a clue that make themselves and the site actually look bad.
Re:Engadget review negative? (Score:4, Informative)
I think that the Pi was supposed to be a desktop system. It has a HDMI port and can decode 1080p video. That is a desktop device. Flash is a none starter for sure but YouTube should have worked.
The Pi is really cool but I think it has real issues at this time.
1. The GPU is not being used well. From what I hear X is not yet using the GPU for acceleration.
2. Limited RAM.
3. Slow IO. SD cards are not very speedy.
The first they can fix. The third might be fixable with using a USB Hard drive or a NAS.
It would be great if this could run say OpenOffice and play videos well. Schools and libraries could have whole labs of them all running form an inexpensive NAS and with a print server.
As a hacking tool this is great. For a general education tool it could also be really good but limited right now. As a programing education tool it could be really good, Do they have Squeak running on it yet? I know Python is up and working and they have a BBC Basic for it.
The thing is that this is a developers release. It isn't soup yet. It is really cool and full of potential but Endgadet was reviewing it as a finished product which it really isn't yet. I do think it is good that it showed it's curent limitations so the developers can work on eliminating them.
Re:Engadget review negative? (Score:5, Informative)
But it can do browsing and other things. The Endgaget reviewer went and did several boneheaded things- whether out of ignorance or deliberation will be left as a determination by the reader...
XBMC does do what they're claiming it does. It DOES run Quake III:Arena. The thing is...you can't just nab any old Linux binary and run it. You have to code to leverage the GPU to get it to do many of the heavy load-lifting things and only the things they showcased before release have been made to work that way.
The biggest thing (and they never changed their tune...you lot may have not been paying attention...) is that they've said from the beginning that this was intended for computer science education , not as a general purpose computer (though you CAN make it that way with a bit of effort- effort, I might add, that's being done by several of the distributions working on producing a version of their project for the R-Pi...).
Re:CPU (Score:4, Informative)
That's very unlikely. These devices achieve their low cost because of the System On a Chip (SOC) design. The board layout and everything else is built around that Broadcom SOC. Simply "swapping it out" with something else would mean respinning the entire board and having to resubmit for all their qualifications. It's not trivial by any means.