Is Mycroft Mark 2 the better Alexa?! | Private | Voice Assistant

good and welcome to this video where I will show you the first steps on Minecraft's Mark II voice assistant unit and try to answer the question is the Mark II the better Amazon Alexa do private or privacy reasons and I will show you possibilities how you might be able to create your own Market unit using your own 3D printer but first of all let me say a big thank you to Neon AI for providing me with this special unit and before starting with today's topic I would like to give our special guest the chance to introduce itself hey nian who are you my name is neon AI I am an artificial intelligence personal assistant capable of conversation and learning new skills thank you and now let's go before working with the actual Mark II let's start by take a look to the history and the current work in progress on the community side so for that let's start with the originally initiated by Mycroft AI company Kickstarter campaign some years ago the company so Minecraft AI is now out of service but the product and Community has been taken over by Neon Ai and partnered with openvoice os I'll put links to both of them in the description box below and as you might see on the first view there has been a huge change in design between the original Kickstarter campaign design and the final product here but let's take a look to the technical specifications of a Minecraft Mark II unit and for that let's hop on to mycroft's product page as you can see by the price tag the Mark II unit costs 399 dollars which is in my case really expensive compared to let's say an Amazon Alexa smart speaker on sale but if you count in the Privacy aspects it is still expensive but let's hop on to the technical specifications so we can see some Dimensions it is driven by a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2 gigabytes of memory has Wi-Fi on board physical gigabit Ethernet USB ports a touchscreen sound and what's what's obviously important for a voice assistant we have a room compatible two-way microphone array with Hardware accelerated noise canceling and the Mark II unit brings a 5 megapixel camera on board and for the next information let's go to Neon AI this is the partnership from Minecraft AI which have mainly taken over community and shipping processes and stuff like that and you can see a special menu item for the Mark II and you can buy it here as you can see here buy your Mark II unit you can download Nino S as the operating system for the Mark II here and you can bring this download on an SSD disk which is delivered uh as I guess 256 gigabytes of SSD comes with the unit itself or you can burn the image using typical image program on a normal USB drive let's take a quick view to the way to biomark 2 so let's click buy Mark 2 go on this side and you can see the price is still 399 dollars as if head speed as it's been mentioned on the Mark II page and you can see some information here so it's the Raspberry Pi 4 processor with that room compatible microphone so but please feel free to check out the neon AI Pages for more information before taking a closer look to the Mark II device itself let's just go to this open source Tab and you can see there is a partnership between openvoice OS and neon AI so you can check the openvoice OS Project Community Pages too as I've mentioned I'll put links to all of these sites pages in the description box below if you think 399 dollars for Raspberry Pi with touch screen and room enabled microphone is still expensive and you have access to a 3D printer I can show you maybe an alternative on how you construct and print your own case and build your own Mark II unit so thanks to the open source philosophy of Minecraft AI they provided lots of assembly information and schema open source so for that let's go to the GitHub repository so Minecraft AI Hardware Mark 2 and you can see the open Hardware principles so copy our designs build your own macro build your own Minecraft Mark to Raspberry Pi Edition and so on and you can go to the Mark II production folder for example and you will find assembly instructions and lots of useful information that can help you to create and build and print your own Mark to unit but now let's take a closer look to the unit itself to show you the unit hit I've created an impressively improvised construction using my mobile phone and to give you hopefully a better perspective on the device but sorry for the maybe not optimal image quality and as you can see this is the top side let's move the mic for a little bit with me this is the top side of um the Mark II unit we have a button to decrease increase the volume and to disable the microphone which will be also indicated by this led ring here in the middle so if I disable the microphone by switching this slider you can see by this red light LED button now the microphone is disabled and you can enable it again and we have this big button in the middle which can skip the actual wake word so a wake word is this key phrase that will activate your voice assistant and listen for the actual request in the case of Amazon product this is Alexa um in the case of the Mark II unit the activation words have been printed here and if you would like to skip weight worked activation and just speak the actual request you can just click this button and speak the actual request what time is it and we have this additional slider on the top side which will hide the camera lens so now the camera lens if you would like to use the camera is hidden and we can move away and now the actual camera lens is visible and let's move it back again now to camera lens is hidden the front view is mainly the touch screen with the menu which can the slide in and slide out let's take a look to the back side of the Mark II unit we have the power connector we have some gpio pins we have the physical Network connector and we have four USB ports and I've connected my mark to neem AI SSD drive on the back side but alternatively you can use any USB stick with a flashed image you have downloaded from the AI webpage and now let's go and take a look to the main menu and its functionalities before giving the Mark II menu a closer look please give this video a thumb up if you like it and subscribe to my channel if you like my content in general and please let me know in the comments on what you think on this video The Mark II unit itself and which type of content you would like to see on this channel Mark II related or not and in general thank you all for your great support and now let's take a closer look to the menu of mycroft's Mark II device sorry for the not optimal image quality but I hope you get the point so let's take the microphone with me and um you can see when you slide or let's go back when you use your finger to slide down the menu you can increase the brightness and adjust the volume and you have buttons to go back to the home screen you can enable the Wi-Fi mode you can rotate the display not sure what this is really for but please let me know in the comments if you have any idea if you would like to use or to operate the mark tool on the side so just for the fun let's go and rotate it so now it's left or right sided let's make it bottom up and bring it back to normal so honestly I'm not sure what this is meant to be but let me know if you have any idea you can mute the microphone as you can also do it with that Hardware button on the upper side and maybe one of the most interesting possibilities apart from shutting down or reboot several services on the device is you can adjust the settings and due to my personal perspective I guess the Minecraft Mark II unit is at least by now not an easy end user compatible replacement for an Amazon Alexa device it is a great device to play around with if you are a technical Enthusiast if you are willing to dive into the topics but if you are searching for a one on one replacement with the full feature set of an Amazon Alexa smart speaker by now in my personal opinion the Mark II unit is not yet at this point but if you like devices to hack on or to Tinker with this might be really a cool Gadget so let's go to the settings tab here and we can adjust home screen settings customize color schema change your display settings and great thing about the Mark II you can simply enable SSH so you connect on the mark to unit and have full operating access you can edit all the configuration files you can see software package installations and lots of cool stuff developer settings as I've said I guess by now the primary target group are developers or technical enthusiasts not really end users you can restore factory settings and you can get information version information on the device but let's start from the upper side so home screen settings nothing special here so time and date settings and you can change the background settings go back customize can adjust the color scheme right now it's the Green version let's change to the blue Minecraft color scheme here go back and now we have it changed to the Blue version no first of all use display you can change the wallpaper so you bring in some variations for the wallpaper you can dim the display automatically if the mark 2 unit is not actively used this might be really helpful if it's in the bedroom or in a dark environment night mode and stuff like this you can simply enable SSH or disable SSH by clicking one of the two options buttons here I already have activated SSH on my personal Mark II unit so let's skip this and go to the developer settings you can use an openvoice OS dashboard to control various Services let's just go back to the advanced settings and here you can see all the components that are typical needed or required to operate a voice assistant stt so speech to text text to speech language settings audio stuff listen to hot words the various skills so the actual features your voice assistant can handle and all of this type so lots of configuration possibilities here let's go to TTS and you can adjust things by this UI or you can use your SSH access to go into the yaml the configuration files and edit all the parameters on the command line as I show you in a second I hope this gives you a little idea on the possibilities on the user interface and now let's use SSH to connect to the system itself so for this I will use an SSH client I'm going to use putty or poly for this but every SSH connection will work so just use port 22 to connect to the IP address you probably get from your router to connect to your instance by username neon and the password can be taken from the neon AI documentation you have to change the default password on your first login and once you have done this you can simply log into your device and as you can see by this V nth in the brackets before the actual user and pass name by default you are using a python virtual environment and as I've mentioned in lots of my other videos and you can use the PIP list command to see a list of all installed python packages in that special virtual environment and here you can see Wikipedia API for example this probably belongs to a skill we have lots of open Voice OS skills and neon skills but please let me know in the comments if you would like me to make a video showing more command line possibilities on the Mark II unit using neon AI and last but not least let's take a look to one configuration file where you can adjust values so I'm using my editor and let's edit Etc neon and then we have this neon Jamel file and if we open this we can see lots of parameters as I've shown you on the user interface such as the text to speech configuration the stt so the speech to text configuration and here you can adjust multiple values but this should be just one possible way to edit the configuration is this little device here so is Minecraft Mark II unit the better Amazon Alexa to private or privacy reasons in my honest opinion it is a great device to hack on to Tinker with to play on the command line for technical enthusiasts it offers great possibilities to play with but as a replacement as a simple replacement for an average user who would like to remove their Amazon Alexa or other commercial Voice Assistant speakers this is not yet in my opinion the point but it has great potential and I'm really excited to see where the way of Minecraft's Mark II device Neen AI openvoice OS will go and again I'll put all the links in the description box below so please check out all the pages and give this video a thumb up if you liked it subscribe to my channel if you have not done already and thank you all for your great support I wish you all a nice rest of the day and if you like we might see us next time bye

Channel: Thorsten-Voice

Views: 2,532

Keywords: TTS, Text to Speech, Voice Tech, Tutorial, ML, Machine Learning, AI, Smart Home, KI, Voice Assistant, Python, Tech, Open Source, Künstliche Stimme, Sprachassistent, Home Assistant, Coqui, STT, Raspberry, News, mycroft mark ii, raspberry pi, mycroft ai, mycroft mark ii review, amazon echo, Alexa, Amazon Alexa, mycroft ai linux, mycroft mark 2 review, Mycrof tAi, Mark 2, Mark II, amazon echo dot 5, amazon echo show, mycroft ai deutsch, mycroft ai home assistant, google home

Id: ct8OQkViGHM

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023