The code I'm using on my Google AIY (most logic comes from https://github.com/google/aiyprojects-raspbian/tree/voicekit)
Personally I have fun using Google Assistant's [Easter eggs] (https://www.reddit.com/r/aiyprojects/comments/6ab6p5/some_of_the_aiy_easter_eggs/), but it can do basic Google Assistant things like conversions, setting timers, etc. It can't play Music though the Assistant, sadly (more on that below).
I wanted to integrate with Google Music and hook this up to my Bluetooth speaker
to play songs with voice commands but alas, the Assistant does not seem to have
Google Music functionality built-in. Instead it says the functionality is
supported when asking it to "play some music", but it gets confused when asked
to play a genre, album, song, etc. I used [this repo]
(https://github.com/Tom-Archer/gmusicaiy) to start and added my own tweaks for
more music stream control and support for playing individual songs from a Google
Music library. As a note, the repo documentation is slightly out of
date now that actor.add_keyword is deprecated in the AIY code.
Pretty basic, but useful for when I don't want to leave it running all day.
So I can make sure everything's the latest and greatest. Eventually I'll probably have it update its own code too.
For the music to work, you'll need to install gmusicapi with
pip install gmusicapi
and vlc with
sudo apt-get install vlc
TL;DR: If you're using a Raspberry Pi 3, DO NOT use the built-in Bluetooth!!
Right now it seems the RasPi 3 has issues with the built-in Bluetooth. Using
it, I was able to play music through my UE BOOM 2 speaker (although the sound
quality wasn't that great due to a known issue with WiFI and Bluetooth
compatibility on RasPi 3s),
but it cut out eventually with the following in journalctl -r:
Nov 05 19:50:54 google-aiy kernel: Bluetooth: hci0 link tx timeout
<working fine for the stream besides a few skipped microseconds>
It seems it's not an uncommon issue for others as well:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=166564.
My workaround was to use an external Bluetooth dongle ([this]
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009ZIILLI/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
is the one I'm using) and to add the following line to the Pi's
/boot/config.txt:
dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt
This completely resolved the stream quality AND made it so the connection would stop randomly dying. Now the music will keep playing until I tell my AIY to stop the stream.
On the Raspberry Pi 3, BlueZ is used as the Bluetooth stack. However, BlueZ >= v5.0 doesn’t support ALSA, but PulseAudio does and BlueZ supports PulseAudio >= v5.0, resulting in the following : BlueZ → PulseAudio → ALSA
Before you accidentally blow out your speaker after starting PulseAudio, I
highly recommend you change the following under Element PCM in
/usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output.conf.common from this:
volume = merge
To this:
volume = ignore
volume-limit = 0.005
I'm not sure why, but it is otherwise EXTEREMELY LOUD if you do not do this and you plan on connecting a Bluetooth device.