Google Homie

What if your Google Home could also express through body language?

The way we interact with voice assistants is always through direct orders. Although their makers did their best to give them a realistic sounding voice, there is no space for etiquette when ordering to turn off the light or asking about the weather.

But if being rude to Amazon Alexa or Google Home is admissible, and actually less prone to misunderstandings then if adding any “please” or “thanks” to our commands, are we sure that getting used to being impolite to our voice assistant will not also make us impolite to each other?

We thought of an idea to make us more sensitive to how we communicate with voice assistants. We created a body for a Google Home device, and we made it react to good and bad words, by trembling with fear or swaying with joy. A subtle feature that doesn’t affect the interaction with the device, but an effective way to make us aware of our manners also when we communicate with voice assistants.

Google Homie is a Google Home assistant housed in a custom-made movable stand. To get the Google Home to move we didn’t interfere at all with the functioning of the original device but instead added another voice assistant, based on a Raspberry Pi and the Google AIY Voice Kit, that reacts with the same wake word of the Google Home.

Each time the user asks a command, the Raspberry Pi voice assistant checks for positive or negative words on the sentence and makes the Google Home sway or tremble by activating different motions for the servo motors on the stand.