How to install google assistant on raspberry pi 【step by step】

These are good times for techies and also promoting their interest in the youngest. The raspberry motherboard was born with a similar intention and its tiny size lends itself to a thousand and one possible uses, including installing Google Assistant on Raspberry Pi. How? Let's see it.

Index of contents

What is Raspberry Pi?

You know we have a bad habit of putting a little bit of history in the tutorials just to get into context. Raspberry Pi is an extremely small (less than 8 x 3 cm) single motherboard computer developed in 2011 and released in 2012 in Cambridge, England.

What makes this device multifaceted and special is that it consists of all the elements of a computer and therefore it is fully prepared to receive the installation of an operating system and start operating immediately. This motherboard we get it naked as we can do with the Arduino ones. There are already several versions that improve the original, although all of them have a cost below € 50.

If you want to document more in depth about Raspberry Pi and its functions, take a look at this article: What is Raspberry Pi?

Materials and resources needed

We come to the list of what we need to get the Google Assistant running on Raspberry Pi:

• Speaker with Jack 3.5 connection: it does not matter the size, although if we are going to mount a device similar to Google Home or Google Home Mini, it is convenient to keep it small. Microphone with connection via USB: any model is worth it, although we recommend that you take a look at its sensitivity so as not to buy one that needs us to be a span away to capture our voice. Raspberry Pi: any of its versions serves us since Google Assistant is not a device that is going to demand a lot of resources from the motherboard. Raspbian operating system: available in the download section of the official website, we leave you the link. Micro SSD card: to burn the Raspbian OS image into it and put it in the Raspberry Pi. A computer: laptop or desktop to carry out the configuration. Google account: to create a developer project and access the Google Cloud Platform. A box or case: to cover the Raspberry Pi once the process is complete.

If apart from this you are considering buying a Raspberry Pi, we recommend reading: What model Raspberry Pi I bought.

Installation process

We are going to divide it into two sections: Google Assistant and Raspberry Pi. This is because the tutorial is quite long and we don't want to make it more convoluted than necessary, so we will also add screenshots of each step. You won't complain, huh?

Preparation of Google Assistant

• We go to Google Cloud Platform and create a new project that we can call "Google Assistant" . We leave you screenshots of the process:

  

  Created the project we go to the hamburger menu of Google Cloud Platform <APIs and services <Control Panel:

  

  In the Google Cloud Platform bar we select our project "Google Assistant" and then we click the button "+ Enable Apis and Services":

  

  

  In the search engine we enter "Google Assistant API" and when it appears we select it and click Enable:

  

  

  Now that we are in the Google Assistant API section, we give Credentials in the left menu and once inside, Consent Screen. In Application Name we write “assistant” (for example, since Google Assistant has CopyRight) and Save.

  

  

  

  In the pop-up that appears, we select Create Credentials <Create OAuth Customer ID. Arrived at the new section, in Application Type we mark Other, we call it again "assistant" and Create:

  

  

  Another popup will appear with OAuth Customer Credentials that you must save for later. They are your ID and secret code.

  

• We will use this data to create a JSON (J avaScript Object Notation) in Raspberry Pi, so we must select it and download it:

  

Before going ahead in Google's My Account <Activity Controls, we recommend activating the synchronization options for web or microphone activity.

Preparation of Raspberry Pi

• We install Raspbian OS on our PC. Once installed, we mount the image of it on the SSD that will later be on the Raspberry Pi. We connect the Raspberry Pi to a monitor with the HDMI cable. We enter the Google Cloud Platform with the browser and access our "wizard" project and download the JSON file again from the Credentials section. In the desktop menu, we access the Terminal.

Since from this point what you must do is introduce lines of code to execute processes in the program, we are going to leave you two sources:

1. On the one hand, in NovaSpirit you have the list of commands that you must copy in the terminal. Basically you will need to install Python 3, some Raspberry Pi configuration tools and our Google Assistant project. If it falls short, Google developers leave us a step-by-step tutorial of the commands from the beginning. To optimize the sensitivity of the USB microphone that is connected to Raspberry pi we can also use the alsamixer command in the terminal . With F6 we select the USB port of the microphone to change the sound card. With F5 we change the parameters of the volume to the maximum. We press Esc and we leave.

Finally, and for all those who do not feel totally comfortable in the Shakespearean language and do not want to screw up, we leave you a video tutorial in Spanish that includes all the steps that we have already shown you with screenshots and later the process of entering commands in Raspberry Pi:

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, Quad Core 1.2GHz CPU Broadcom BCM2837 64bit, 1GB RAM, WiFi, Bluetooth BLE EUR 37.44

Conclusions about Google Assistant on Raspberry Pi

Although here we have only seen how we can turn a Raspberry Pi into our particular Google Assistant, this little wonder is more bullying than it appears to the naked eye. We understand that this tutorial can be a bit overwhelming for users less used to entering console commands, but there are not many that you must enter and you can copy them from the various sources that we have provided.

You can take a look at: The best uses for Raspberry Pi.

For our part, we hope that the tutorial has been clear and useful for you. As always, do not hesitate to leave us any suggestion in the comments. Until next time!