JADE pretty much complete!

Its been a while since the last devlog, I know. I’ve been really busy these past couple weeks of summer and have not been able to post, though I was able to work on JADE a little bit every day until its pretty much as done as it is now.

To start, the pipeline of JADE is finished, tested, and functional. For hardware, using a mini microphone, mini amp, mini speaker, a breadboard, and lots of jumper wires, I was able to make my first “hardware project” connected to a raspberry pi. The pipeline of waiting for a wakeword (“JADE”), then activating once hearing the wakeword and using a speech to text engine to process audio (all using the microphone), then sending the request to an agent, which will output a message that will be played using text to speech on the mini speaker, all works!

Some things I tweaked were, for one, the agentic architecture. Originally, I had a global agent that controlled 5 sub-agents that specialized in specific tasks (e.g. calendar agent, weather agent, etc…) but ended up switching to a one-agent structure that uses an embedding model beforehand to filter for the 5 most relevant tools before passing the query and appropriate tools to the agent. I did this because running multiple agents using the strands API on a raspberrypi is extremely computationally intensive and makes the pi reboot itself.

Additionally, the slack tools and slack agent were deleted because they were too complicated and did not fit into the scope of this small project. The calendar tools were also refactored to interface with Google Calendar.

All in all, the pipeline works, and this was a great project wherein I learned how to write code and set up a raspberry pi, use agents, and use audio I/O, all which definitely improved my abilities as a programmer. Expect a ship soon!