EE 377 Project Summary
Pradip Sapkota
The aim was to design and develop an AI-based voice assistant, driven by Raspberry Pi,
named Jack, which combined hardware and software to interact with users in real time.
The project lets us conceive how this can be met through a small and cheap design aided
by some key functionalities of embedded platforms, to name a few. The system has multimodal feedback integration with speech processing wake-word activation on the
Raspberry Pi-based voice assistant prototype `Jack'.
The following is the list of the diverse subsystems; first major element, it will be hardware
realization. The central controller will be a Raspberry Pi, which will be linked with a
microphone for user command input and LEDs loaded on GPIO pins for visual feedback.
Here, the green LED represented 'listening' while the red indicated an idle system—an easy
and obvious interaction pattern.
The second element is going to be software development. Python scripts are to be
programmed for wake-word detection, audio input, and responses of the system. Google
Gemini Pro API was integrated to allow natural language interpretation, and gTTS was used
for human-like audio output; this way, Jack could return answers to the user's queries in
real time.
The third element focused on the system integration. Hardware and software components
were tested separately and later combined to show seamless operation on voice
recognition, LED feedback, and audio response. The speed of response was to be
maximized with errors in wake-word detection minimized.
Finally, this project was accentuated in terms of evaluation and documentation. It was
confirmed that Jack was very well recognized as the wake-word "Jack" and consistently
reacted to spoken questions by processing them and giving audible replies along with
proper LED signals. Portable, cost-effective, versatile were the strengths while limitations
included microphone sensitivity and dependence on the internet connection.
The EE 377 project provided hands-on experience in applying concepts learned in
embedded systems to a real-world project by designing the hardware. The project was
related to software programming and system integration. The following development with
Jack added to teamwork, problem finding and solving, technical communication, etc.,
methods/as they are going to face the senior design and other engineering projects in
future.