my suggestion is aswell use MM2. You don’t have to start from scratch that costs a ton of time and makes asking harder.
For most stuff there is already someone that has done something similar thats helps.

As an example my setup is
MM2 as info displays (probably multiple mirrors sooner or later)
The standalone offline voice recognition snips for all smarthome stuff (obviously works with all the online alexa stuff ect aswell)
And as general backbone that really controls all the smarthome stuff something like openhab/homeassistant.

Those are all great software parts that support you. you obviously can live for example without openhab/homeassistant and do controls directly with modules in MM2, but the moment you have many devices you want to control it kind of gets messy. (I am a big fan of keeping the software parts simple so you can maintain something without being scared that suddenly everythings broken)

Obviously same for stuff like your machine learning. I would just have it run standalone with just a couple connections to for example MM2 to tell it which user it recognised.

What language stuff should you learn? Your experienced with java and python, so just use them. Can’t really see a reason to use another when your good in them.

So my suggestion is use this premade software out there. You obviously can develop the wheel again, but you probably spend a ton of time without getting a better endproduct (would be more of a educational thing to rebuild something like that xD)
Then you can spend all your time on really building the stuff you want to build like this facial recognition.
Is a year enough? Well hard to say for me it would be never because with my smarthome stuff it’s really always the same thing I build one thing and already have 5 ideas for new stuff to add.

When you directly display MM2 on your raspberrypi you could do an overlay with omxplayer. it supports hardware acceleration which makes it run really smooth with gifs

Here is a first peak view at the voice recognition I currently work on for my MM project.
For the start I planned pretty much the same features like Mykle1’s Hello-Lucy
The recognition is in German, since I am German and we already have a ton of english ones ;)
Like Mykle1’s it’s doing the recognition fully offline, but accepts full sentences and recognices your intent
Still in mid of work but wanted to share a first view on what I did so far (Forgive me the really really bad video quality)

https://youtu.be/jpM-4pq8dTs

Which commands beside the ones from Hello-Lucy would you like to see?

Yes it is absolutely possible. Although I can’t tell you how good existing alexa modules for MM2 are, since I personally would never let a alexa near my house lol :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:
But in general you just need to create a skill for alexa with the features and a listener module for MM2 that reacts to whatever the skill outputs (or when you just want to use existing stuff on MM2 only something listening)
https://github.com/dolanmiu/MMM-awesome-alexa
I don’t know wether this works and it did not really get changed in the last months, but should be at least a good start on how to create the feature

lmao someone here had to much time :face_with_tears_of_joy:

Yes runs on a raspberry pi 3b

@cowboysdude just did it with node serveronly and then accessed it on my raspy with chromium
localhost:8080 still has the same problem everything but the iframe is still not shown

However I realised that with the type of website (using it for the webpanel of Openhab) I actually want to show later it works perfectly fine ^^

yeah but you still need to train it for the language

One thing I absolutely want to add is that my mirror is activated when I am in Front of it, but thats the speech recognition is automatically activated aswell so I don’t need to use the hotword while I am in front of the mirror :)

Well for anyone interested I created a seperate thread
https://forum.magicmirror.builders/topic/7162/german-voice-recognition