Genie For Home Servers

End User Programmable Virtual Assistants

This repository contains home server version of Genie, the end user programmable assistant. It is a single-user version, suitable for running on low-power devices and smart speakers.

Genie is a research project from the Stanford University Open Virtual Assistant Lab. You can find more information at https://oval.cs.stanford.edu.

Running almond-server

The recommended way to run almond-server is through podman, a replacement for docker that allows the container to run as your regular user (and thus access PulseAudio from your normal session). You can find the installation instructions here.

To run, use the command:

podman run --name almond -p 3000:3000 \
    -v /dev/shm:/dev/shm \
    -v $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/pulse:/run/pulse \
    --security-opt label=disable \
    docker.io/stanfordoval/almond-server

You can now navigate to 127.0.0.1:3000 to access Genie, or use your voice with the hotword "computer".

To manage the container later, you can use:

podman start almond # start the container again
podman stop almond # stop the container
podman logs almond # look at the most recent logs of a running container

I am a Mac!

Voice support is only available on Linux. On Mac or Windows, you can use the following docker command:

docker run --name almond -p 3000:3000 stanfordoval/almond-server:latest-portable

Development setup

To develop almond-server, you should clone this repository, then install the dependencies with:

dnf -y install nodejs gettext make gcc-c++ GraphicsMagick zip unzip # Fedora/RHEL
apt -y install nodejs gettext build-essential make g++ graphicsmagick zip unzip # Ubuntu/Debian

You can then build the repository with:

npm install

This will only install the minimal set of dependencies, and will not install any voice support. To enable voice, you must also run (Linux only):

dnf -y install pulseaudio pulseaudio-libs-devel libcanberra-devel blas-devel atlas-devel sound-theme-freedesktop # Fedora/RHEL
apt -y install pulseaudio libpulse-dev libcanberra-dev libatlas-base-dev sound-theme-freedesktop # Ubuntu/Debian

then run npm install again to pick up the new dependencies.

After installing the dependencies locally, the server can be started using npm start.