Redditor Builds an AI Assistant with a Raspberry Pi, IBM Watson, and a Whole Lot More

With popular AI assistants on the market from Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, you might wonder why someone would bother creating their own. It could be to develop something more capable and knowledgeable. But, more realistically, Redditor Ideanusx probably made Ada for good ol’ fashioned fun.

Ada, named for famed mathematician and computer science pioneer Ada Lovelace, runs on a Raspberry Pi. But, this isn’t your usual setup based on installing the Alexa SDK. Instead, Ideanusx patched together a huge variety of software to give Ada a very comprehensive skillset.

First up, IBM Watson is used to put the “AI” in AI assistant. That is able to interpret requests and responses from the rest of software. If Watson can’t find an answer, it passes the question along to Wolfram Alpha. Voice-to-text is handled by the Google Speech API, and Jasper takes care of voice control with the commands it finds in that text.

Everything is tied together with Python and PHP, and a MySQL database is used for personal information. As you can see in the video, Ada works surprisingly well. That’s especially true considering how many independent services are at work here, and that Ideanusx spent just a day or two on programming the whole thing.