Build your own Amazon Echo - Turn a PI into a voice controlled gadget [Resources_Hands on]

As a young man, I yearned for a machine like the ship's computer on Star Trek: a gadget that can listen and obey a human voice, and answer in kind. Fifteen years ago, after reading about university researchers who had gotten voice-controlled artificial intelligence systems working, I taught myself Linux and set up a server in my attic in the hope that the technology had arrived to let me build such a thing myself. It had not.