HAL 9000

What’s often confused us is why more people don’t take their inspiration from the original AI assistant: HAL 9000, the creepy, disembodied voice of the ship’s computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. We were therefore delighted to discover this AI assistant by Jan Aranda Arcas, aka Withoutsleep_dev. We asked Jan about his build; here’s what he said: “I chose Raspberry Pi because I wanted HAL to be easy for anyone to build while still serving as a useful hardware interface. It handles receiving the AI’s responses, playing the audio, and recording the user’s voice before sending it to the Python script running on the main computer. The Raspberry Pi offers a great balance of performance, low power consumption, affordability, and excellent community support. Over the years, its community has made it an incredible platform for projects like this.

“I also have a personal reason for choosing it. I received this Raspberry Pi as a gift from a friend of my father’s, who encouraged me to experiment and build interesting projects. HAL 9000 ended up being the perfect project for it.”