Crafting a Custom Voice Assistant with Perplexity
Last Updated on August 28, 2025 by Editorial Team
Author(s): Deepak Krishnamurthy
Originally published on Towards AI.
Looking beyond Siri, Google Assistant, and Alex
Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri are the dominating voice assistants available for everyday use. These assistants have become ubiquitous in almost every home, carrying out tasks from home automation, note taking, recipe guidance and answering simple questions. When it comes to answering questions though, in the age of LLMs, getting a concise and context based answer from these voice assistants can be tricky, if not non-existent. For example if you ask Google Assistant how the market is reacting to Jerome Powell’s speech in Jackson Hole on Aug 22, it will simply reply that it does not know the answer and give a few links that you can peruse. That is if you have the screen based Google Assistant.
This article outlines the steps to create a custom voice assistant using Perplexity API and a Raspberry Pi, detailing the hardware and software configurations required. The author shares insights on utilizing specific components such as microphones and speakers, setting up wake words, and coding the assistant to respond to user queries in concise, direct terms, ultimately enhancing the capabilities of conventional voice assistants like Google Assistant or Siri.
Read the full blog for free on Medium.
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