Want a Google Home but would rather prioritize cost savings over fit and finish? Getting the latest issue of the officially magazine of Raspberry Pi, the MagPi. The Raspberry Pi foundation has often included freebies along with its magazine, but this might be the best yet – it’s a kit co-created by Raspberry Pi and Google, and it brings all the hardware you need to get set up with the Google Assistant SDK, and the Google Cloud Speech API.
You still need to supply your own Raspberry Pi 3, which is not that steep a hurdle to climb, but the magazine pack ships with a cardboard case, a speaker, a stereo microphone assembly and a large arcade button for activating the voice input piece of the puzzle. That’s another advantage that real Home has, since it’s entirely passive in terms of voice activation, but this DIY kit is fully customizable so you can build on whatever functionality you can feasibly dream up.
This is a cool way to get people excited about building things for Google Home and for Google Assistant, something the search giant seems keen to do given its recent opening up of Assistant to hardware makers.