project_alias

Why we included this project

If you have ever wished your smart speaker would answer to a wake word of your own choosing, this project is a fun way to experiment with exactly that. Project Alias is a Raspberry Pi-based add-on that sits between you and a commercial voice assistant, running Pocketsphinx wake-word detection so it can listen for a custom phrase and then trigger the assistant on your behalf. It also plays noise into the assistant's own microphone to block its always-on listening, which makes it an interesting hands-on exercise in privacy for home hardware. The setup is designed to be approachable: you can flash a ready-made image, attach a ReSpeaker hat, and configure everything through a browser interface on your phone. Note that it is a DIY build rather than a library you drop into your own software, so it suits makers and tinkerers who want a tangible weekend project more than developers integrating speech into an app.