Open Source Summit + ELC North America 2019

Cortico and the Social Machines group at the MIT Media Lab are building a network of hyper local conversation centers in order to raise unknown and underrepresented issues into public discourse. To do so, we've built the digital hearth, a group conversation recording device deployed into communities to capture speech and ideas.

Wes will describe the design and technical capabilities of the digital hearth, which operates disconnected from the Internet but periodically syncs its data with Cortico's servers, downstream speech to text, and natural language processing systems. He will talk about the hardware configuration (a custom 8 channel mic that interfaces with an embedded Raspberry Pi), as well as the in-device Raspbian based software stack that allows for offline operation and remote debugging. Wes will also talk about how features of the hardware implementation affect Cortico's automated speech recognizer and speaker identification systems.