Our friends, 8 Bits and a Byte, have built a Historic Voicebot, allowing users to chat to their favourite historical figures.

It’s rather marvellous.

All the skills

Coding? Check. Woodwork? Check. Tearing apart a Google AIY Kit in order to retrofit it into a vintage telephone while ensuring it can still pick up voice via the handset? Check, check, check – this project has it all.

The concept consists of two parts:

• A touchscreen with animations of a historical figure. The touchscreen also displays the dialog and has buttons so people can ask an FAQ.
• A physical phone that captures speech and gives audio output, so it can be used to ask questions and listen to the answer.

While Nicole doesn’t go into full detail in the video, the Ada animation uses Dialogflow, Node.js, and HTML Canvas to work, and pairs up with the existing tech in the Google AIY Kit.

And, if you don’t have an AIY Kit to hand, don’t worry; you can have the same functionality using a standard USB speaker and microphone, and Google Home running on a Raspberry Pi.

You can find a tutorial for the whole project on hackster.io.

Follow 8 Bits and a Byte

There are a lot of YouTube channels out there that don’t have the follow count we reckon they deserve, and 8 Bits and a Byte is one of them. So, head to their channel and click that subscribe button, and be sure to check out their other videos for some more Raspberry Pi goodness.