Matrix Labs just completed a successful crowdfunding campaign for what amounts to an AI voice recognition system for the Raspberry Pi which allows you, a mere mortal, to make your own Alexa in your basement. Created by Rodolfo Saccoman and Brian Sanchez their first board, the Creator, fits right on top of a standard RaspPi and gives you an 8 microphone array, a temperature sensor, ultraviolet sensor, pressure sensor, and 3D positioning sensors. The Voice is a bit simpler and offers “an open-source VOICE RECOGNITION platform consisting of a 3.14-inches in diameter dev board with a radial array of 7 MEMS microphones connected to a Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA & 64 Mbit SDRAM with 18 RGBW LED’s & 64 GPIO pins.” This means you can offer a light show with your voice recognition
The $99 Voice is shipping soon and you can grab the Creator now.
The company raised $5.8M in funding since inception from Azoic Ventures and Rokk3r Labs. Their latest product was priced at $99 and should be on sale online soon. Basically Matrix wants you to build robots with their stuff.
“Our goal is to create hardware as an enabler to launch apps, businesses, and ideas,” said Saccoman. “Furthermore, we want to remove the barriers to entry for developers of all levels to easily incorporate machine learning, computer vision, and artificial intelligence into their creations.”
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As you can see the Voice and the Creator fit right on top of your Raspberry Pi and adds some real impressive functionality. The entire system is obviously for DIY fans but because it’s completely open source you can build out based on the base offering. It’s a surprisingly cool piece of kit and I, for one, welcome our voice activated Raspberry Pi-powered robotic overlords.
