@Sean
ah great thought I already seen I alexa module that receives the messages. I guess thats a lot better (and easier) solution than running two voice recognitions. he also has a quite good docu on how to set up the whole alexa skill stuff :thumbs_up:

@richland007 expecting you have it running the “standard” way (running mm2 on your pi and directly showing it it on it aswell) You can basically choose whatever way is best suited for you.Mouse and touch obviously directly work fine. But I can’t see a reason not to use external buttons or a voice recognition. As @Sean stated they are not directly compatible with MM2 overall, but at least when running it on your device you can always use workarounds. (an example for this is using omxplayer as overlay to show videos since it performs much better then electron due to hardware acceleration support)
You could for example use a program/module listening to the voice inputs and reacting by doing mouse/keyboard actions in certain places. Same for external buttons over the GPIO pins …
Obviously thats more work than just connection a IR frame or a mouse, but certainly possible when you don’t want to use a mouse and for example can’t add a IR frame anymore (or just don’t want to)

@richland007 I thought you want to run two voice assistants from the same device given you want to use the same mic and the same pi right?
Because now it seems like you want to have alexa in other rooms and mmm-voice for the bathroom ;)
Yes for Alexa you would need to write a module that receives the messages and then just hides the modules accordingly. I am just not sure what exactly you want now.
(never used Alexa, but as far as I know they have some kind of skills aswell you can easily program. Then you just need to write a short module for MM2 that receives those messages and hides/shows the specific modules ;))
For catching wakewords a good offline recognition should be snowboy. Just give it two different hotwords and whenever one is recognised you can directly activate the SST (speech to text engine) of the corresponding voice recognition which for example in case of Sean would be MM-AssistantMk2. (Never used his voice recognition. MMM-Hotword should be a good start it uses snowboy so it should be easy to use it with two hotwords (but @Sean should be able to help you more with his code, since I neither use one of the snowboy/pocketsphinx nor any online voice recongition like alexa. My current offline voice system (currently implementing it to MM2) is snips.).

Btw on the privacy side: yes the big bad NSA is everywhere, but I rather make it hard for them to get my data. When they have to attack my custom stuff at home thats absolutely possible, but still harder then them going to amazon/google and telling them to just give the data out. Second thing is companies like google/amazon I absolutely don’t want to know that private things about me. And we all know that although they claim to respect the privacy, your never sure especially since they already abused the trust before. And last but not least there are criminals that might try to abuse the data for example by catching the data while you want to transfer them to amazon/google or back. So while a offline solution might (as long as you give it internet) not be 100% secure and private, but still a lot more private than having them online. Just make getting your data harder then what they are worth for the attacker. Well enough on that guess thats a whole different topic and in the end it’s your choice anyways Lmao :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

@Sean @richland007 yeah might be true did not test that ;)
Although I still have no clue why to use two in the first place. I mean when you decide to use Alexa Pi because privacy is no big deal for you then why use a different one for MM2 that might be a decent solution but definetly has it’s drawbacks. Can’t see much sence in taking the drawbacks of alexa in terms of privacy and then not even use the advantages :smiling_face_with_open_mouth_cold_sweat:
Whatever if you really want to have two different running with one mic you might want to consider doing it similar to @Sean by using a separate program running all the time catching the different hotwords, that call the two voice recognitions depending on the hotword

@richland007 it definetly works. and why should it not? On the spur of the moment I can’t think of any pc connected device that works with only one software (well excluding some proprietary devices that work only with the company’s stuff).
However for example Mouse, Keyboard, speakers, microphone … all definetly work with multiple programs. The components are always connected to the OS, so any software running on that OS can generally ask it for the informations.
I mean if I wanted I could even split for example the cable of the microphone and connect t to two computers and it would work ^^
I never used Alexa Pi, since it is cloud based and I am no big fan of putting my stuff in the cloud, but usually when setting up voice recognitions, you tell which microphone to listen to

And as an example where you use one muc for 2 programs: when you play video games with a voice chat program in the background and still use the ingame chat ;)

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

@Sean @richland007 Well I guess that highly depends on what you want to achieve xD
I would go cracy with my voice recogntion without a decent Mic array.

But yes when your in a pretty quiet environment and only using it with MM2 --> standing in front of the mirror --> small distance a cheap mic should absolutely be enough.
My minimal needs for a voice recognition are around 5m (obviously without shouting) distance :smiling_face_with_open_mouth_cold_sweat:

However I can’t think of any purpose where two mics would make sence at one device for two modules. Only thing that would make sence is having one mic in each room streaming the audio to a main device that does the speech recognition work (comparable to Alexa with the echo dots)

Well for a cheap one my suggestion would be a respeaker two mic hat (9.9$).

Why wouldn’t you use the same for both? makes not much sence to use two microphone arrays when both modules can just listen to the same. Or do you mean to have mics in multiple rooms? Two respeaker is not really possible since they would use the same GPIO pins, but yes in general you could connect another one over USB. just can’t see why you would want to do this

Obviously depends on what exacty are your needs for the microphone
I really like my respeaker 4mic array (was about 25$ and works quite well with a bit of background music and distances of over 5m), but there are obviously other options.
Generally from what I heard Respeaker and Matrix are quite good. Then you basically have to choose depending on the features you need.
I know quite a few guys that use the reapeaker two mic hat (around 15$) which is a bit cheaper and still works very good. However when you for example play music next to your PI it might make sence to get one that a AEC feature so you can remove a lot of this background music from the recorded audio.

For multiroom setups it might make sence to have a microphone array with a atmega32u4 for each room so they can directly stream the audio to the main device which does the speech processing

Amazing idea

btw which TV stand from Ikea is this?