Show HN: An open-source, Raspberry-Pi-based Siri alternative

It's a shame that the quality of open-source text to speech engines is so much worse than the current commercial state of the art, as that's the most notable difference in the demo videos between this and something like Siri. Would fixing that just be a matter of recording more high-quality free sample libraries, etc., or are there fundamental technical challenges to solve?

I went through the code a little while ago when I first saw this on HN. My thoughts: It really doesn't scale. It is designed for running on a single instance of physical hardware, RPi. In it's current guise it is really difficult to separate out, particularly, the TTS part which is tied to outputting to a speaker. There is also no way to process different parts on different machines, wrap up the answer and post it back to a…

I played around with this project a few months ago, and it was cool, but with some limitations. The microphone I had to use didn't work from very far away (that was my fault for sourcing a crap microphone), and the voice recognition was finicky (even after getting close enough to the mic). I know the voice recognition is just another piece of software that they integrated, but since the project relies on it so much I think it would…