While I type these words, assembled Raspberry PI AIY Project is connected to the laptop patiently waiting for me to strike a conversation. This underwhelmingly looking speaker has found another purpose in my life. The pulsing light glares at me, ready to bring all the internet knowledge to my fingertips. Suddenly, I found myself looking up stuff on Google less and less while working on an article.
Raspberry Pi AIY Project – Editor’s Edition
Windows 10 comes with Cortana, which can do pretty much the same thing and requires no additional hardware. It’s Cortana though, and it will pop an annoying window while the query is being performed. Offloading this task to the Raspberry Pi AIY Project allows me to continue writing while the speaker is searching for the answers. Just push the button/snap your fingers/bang the table then ask a quick question. The speaker will fetch the freshest and the latest collective internet wisdom.
By all means, this is NOT a solution to every internet question but can aid my spelling, grammar and provide me with interesting facts when working on a blog post. This probably won’t come to you as a surprise but English is not my native language and writing things which follow all the rules can be a very hard challenge at times. A spellchecker is a must, but every now and then I’ll butcher a word so badly, that even the best spellchecker can’t figure out what I want to say. The same goes for definitions, synonyms, and my ‘beloved’ prepositions.
In addition to that, a custom action like ‘open this page on my computer‘ (a page where the previous answer was taken from) or ‘fetch my last picture/screenshot‘ are really the crown jewels of that cardboard contraption. Simplistic but very effective, at least for my personal use.
Don’t get this the wrong way, this is not an ultimate tip on how to get you 300% more productive at work. The Raspberry Pi AIY Project has been mostly underused by me, and I wanted to share another way to enjoy the speaker. I’m often locked inside my office for hours to come (that’s the off-work time, totally unlike when I’m locked inside the office with total oddballs at work) working on another project or just writing another Tasker/RaspberryPi tutorial.
The future of the Raspberry Pi AIY Project
I’m not sure how relevant are some of my smallest tasks (previously mentioned picture fetcher and website serving task) but given enough interest in these I might write about them in detail next time. Given more time, Raspberry Pi AIY Project will get more and more tasks assigned to it. It has been only a month since the project has been published and the interesting creations are popping out now and then.
Care to share yours?
While all the Raspberry Pi AIY kits are sold out, there is a waiting list you can sign up for.
