I have been considering building an ARM based jukebox to connect to my stereo. It would be running MPD, and also have Icecast streaming enabled, so that I could also listen to the same playlist from other units in other rooms. Kind of like a Sonos whole house audio system.
I thought it might be cool to also install the open source voice assistant #
Mycroft on one or two as well. Since there is a Mycroft internet radio skill, and I think one for controlling MPD, it would be easy to walk into a room and tell it to play something.
I installed Ubuntu server in a VM, along with Mycroft core. After a little tweaking, it was taking input from my USB headset, and playing the voice results from my speakers. There seems to be a little delay when using voice commands vs typing directly into the console. I'm OK with that, as its pretty quick about setting up timers, or telling me what the weather is. For added geekiness, I installed the dice module, so I could ask it to roll RPG dice. Pretty cool!
I'm trying to decide on what type of microphone setup to use. I could use a USB conference call mic, which would allow me to keep the box out of view. Or I might look into something like the
ReSpeaker 4-Mic Array for Raspberry Pi. I need to find out if most Raspberry Pi hats can be used on other boards which also have the RPi 40 pin connector. I would use a Pi, but there are other options freely available that are more powerful, and have more RAM. The only thing the RPi has going is a huge community.