# Talking Microwave

> A microwave that requires you to flirt with it to turn on. 2nd place at Terrible Ideas Hackathon 2024.

- Type: Raspberry Pi Hardware
- Date: October 2024
- Tags: Raspberry Pi, University, Google Cloud, IoT, ML, AI, Event
- Author: Dylan Kainth (https://dylankainth.com)
- Page: https://dylankainth.com/project/talking-microwave
- [See project on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DBCDaZjqRaz/)
- [Project Github (Server/Pi)](https://github.com/binaryyuki/crazy)

For the 2024 [Terrible Ideas Hackathon](https://terriblehack.com) at Imperial College London, we produced a microwave that requires you to flirt with it to turn on.

Depending on how well you flirt, the microwave will turn on for longer. It also provides 'sassy' verbal feedback over a speaker.

The system works by using a Raspberry Pi 3, attached to a USB Microphone and AUX Speaker. The Pi connects to a button which the user holds while attempting to flirt, and a SSR to control the microwave. We leveraged Google Cloud Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech API's to process natural language to understand what the user was saying and to give the microwave a voice.

[Tony](https://github.com/binaryYuki/) created an API with a model to perform sentiment analysis and generate reply text.

**This project was made in a group of 7. We won 2nd place!**