My AIY

The code I'm using on my Google AIY (most logic comes from https://github.com/google/aiyprojects-raspbian/tree/voicekit)

What can it do?

Regular Google Assistant stuff (Minus stuff that needs Google Home integration)

Personally I have fun using Google Assistant's [Easter eggs] (https://www.reddit.com/r/aiyprojects/comments/6ab6p5/some_of_the_aiy_easter_eggs/), but it can do basic Google Assistant things like conversions, setting timers, etc. It can't play Music though the Assistant, sadly (more on that below).

Music (from your Google Music library only)

I wanted to integrate with Google Music and hook this up to my Bluetooth speaker to play songs with voice commands but alas, the Assistant does not seem to have Google Music functionality built-in. Instead it says the functionality is supported when asking it to "play some music", but it gets confused when asked to play a genre, album, song, etc. I used [this repo] (https://github.com/Tom-Archer/gmusicaiy) to start and added my own tweaks for more music stream control and support for playing individual songs from a Google Music library. As a note, the repo documentation is slightly out of date now that actor.add_keyword is deprecated in the AIY code.

Voice shutdown

Pretty basic, but useful for when I don't want to leave it running all day.

Package upgrades

So I can make sure everything's the latest and greatest. Eventually I'll probably have it update its own code too.

Dependencies

For the music to work, you'll need to install gmusicapi with

pip install gmusicapi

and vlc with

sudo apt-get install vlc

Known Issues + Workarounds

Music: Streaming music over Bluetooth

TL;DR: If you're using a Raspberry Pi 3, DO NOT use the built-in Bluetooth!!

Right now it seems the RasPi 3 has issues with the built-in Bluetooth. Using it, I was able to play music through my UE BOOM 2 speaker (although the sound quality wasn't that great due to a known issue with WiFI and Bluetooth compatibility on RasPi 3s), but it cut out eventually with the following in journalctl -r:

Nov 05 19:50:54 google-aiy kernel: Bluetooth: hci0 link tx timeout
<working fine for the stream besides a few skipped microseconds>

It seems it's not an uncommon issue for others as well: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=166564. My workaround was to use an external Bluetooth dongle ([this] (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009ZIILLI/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1) is the one I'm using) and to add the following line to the Pi's /boot/config.txt:

dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt

This completely resolved the stream quality AND made it so the connection would stop randomly dying. Now the music will keep playing until I tell my AIY to stop the stream.

Music: PulseAudio is way too loud

On the Raspberry Pi 3, BlueZ is used as the Bluetooth stack. However, BlueZ >= v5.0 doesn’t support ALSA, but PulseAudio does and BlueZ supports PulseAudio >= v5.0, resulting in the following : BlueZ → PulseAudio → ALSA

Before you accidentally blow out your speaker after starting PulseAudio, I highly recommend you change the following under Element PCM in /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output.conf.common from this:

volume = merge

To this:

volume = ignore
volume-limit = 0.005

I'm not sure why, but it is otherwise EXTEREMELY LOUD if you do not do this and you plan on connecting a Bluetooth device.