Crafting a Custom Voice Assistant with Perplexity

A custom, hands-free voice assistant can be built using a Raspberry Pi 5, a USB microphone, and a speaker. The project leverages the Perplexity API to provide intelligent, web-indexed answers and the PicoVoice Porcupine engine for custom wake word detection. The Python code manages a continuous listening loop for the wake word, transcribes spoken commands to text, and queries the Perplexity model with a specific system prompt. The AI's generated response is then converted back into speech, creating a functional alternative to commercial voice assistants.