This cute Raspberry Pi AI can listen to what you say and answer your questions

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Key findings

  • The ASRAI project combines Raspberry Pi, a Sony Playstation Eye and a GPIO screen to create a personal AI assistant.
  • It uses the speech recognition software VOSK locally on a Raspberry Pi 4B to interface with a speech model hosted on a PC.
  • Adam Frydrych provides detailed instructions on how to assemble ASRAI using a 3D printer.



If you're interested in AI, a Raspberry Pi is a surprisingly good friend. Even if you don't use the dedicated Raspberry Pi AI kit, you can build some cool AI-based projects using the SBCs. One genius hobbyist has created ASRAI, a voice-activated AI model that runs on a Raspberry Pi 4.

ASRAI – a secure and private Raspberry Pi assistant that you can build yourself


Discovered by PC manual, This cool project comes to us via Adam Frydrych on Hackster.io. This project combines a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, a Sony Playstation Eye, and a 3.5″ GPIO screen to create a personal AI assistant. Adam describes in great detail how he put the project together, including a section on where the Sony Playstation Eye comes into play. Turns out they include a 4-microphone array that's great for ripping out and adding to a Raspberry Pi board, and they only cost about $4 used.

After the hardware was installed, it was time to get the wizard up and running:


My AI assistant uses a similar approach to other successful speech recognition systems (notably Rhasspy). However, in my case, the Raspberry Pi 4B runs speech recognition software (called VOSK) locally and communicates with a large language model hosted on one of my PCs via an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint (Ollama). Thanks to NordVPN's Meshnet, I can do this from anywhere in the world.

To add a little charm, Adam included a face to indicate when the assistant is sleeping or listening. If you want to follow Adam's steps, you can download the project for yourself and swap out these images as you see fit. Just make sure you have a 3D printer and a soldering iron handy, as the project requires both.


If you want to see more AI-based Pi shenanigans, check out how our writer Daniel Allen turned his Raspberry Pi into an AI assistant. And if you fancy newer hardware, Daniel also tried out several AIs on the Raspberry Pi 5 so you don't have to.

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