Building a voice assistant for a Flutter app¶

With Alan AI SDK for Flutter, you can create a voice assistant or chatbot and embed it to your Flutter app. The Alan AI Platform provides you with all the tools and leverages the industry’s best Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and Speech Synthesis technologies to quickly build an AI assistant from scratch.

In this tutorial, we will build a simple Flutter app with Alan AI voice and test drive it. The app users will be able to tap the voice assistant and give custom voice commands, and the AI assistant will reply to them.

YouTube

If you are a visual learner, watch this tutorial on Alan AI YouTube Channel.

What you will learn¶

How to add a voice interface to a Flutter app
How to write simple voice commands for a Flutter app

What you will need¶

To go through this tutorial, make sure the following prerequisites are met:

You have signed up to Alan AI Studio.
You have created a project in Alan AI Studio.
You have set up the Flutter environment and it is functioning properly. For details, see Flutter documentation.
(If running the app on an emulator) All virtual microphone options must be enabled. On the emulator settings bar, click More (…) > Microphone and make sure all toggles are set to the On position.
(If running the app on a device) The device must be connected to the Internet. The Internet connection is required to let the Android app communicate with the dialog script run in the Alan AI Cloud.

Note

When you sign up to Alan AI Studio, Alan AI adds free interactions to your balance to let you get started. To get additional interactions to your balance, link your Alan AI account with your GitHub account and give stars to Alan AI repositories. For details, see Adding free interactions.

Step 1: Create a Flutter app¶

For this tutorial, we will be using a simple Flutter app. Let’s create it.

Open the IDE and select to start a new Flutter project.
Select Flutter Application as the project type. Then click Next.
Enter a project name (for example, myapp). Then click Next.
Click Finish.

Step 2: Integrate the app with Alan AI¶

Now we will add the Alan AI button to our app. Do the following:

In the Flutter project, open the pubspec.yaml file. Under dependencies, add the Alan AI voice dependency: alan_voice: x.x.x. To make sure you import the latest package version, check the alan_voice package page.
pubspec.yaml¶
```
dependencies:
  flutter:
    sdk: flutter
  alan_voice: 3.0.0
```
In the lib folder, open the main.dart file. At the top of the file, add the following import statement:
main.dart¶
```
import 'package:alan_voice/alan_voice.dart';
```

In the main.dart file, locate the _MyHomePageState class. To this class, add the _MyHomePageState() method for initializing the Alan AI button:

main.dart¶

class _MyHomePageState extends State<MyHomePage> {
  _MyHomePageState() {
    /// Init Alan AI button with project key from Alan AI Studio
    AlanVoice.addButton(
      "",
      buttonAlign: AlanVoice.BUTTON_ALIGN_LEFT);

    /// Handle commands from Alan AI Studio
    AlanVoice.onCommand.add((command) {
      debugPrint("got new command ${command.toString()}");
    });
  }
}

We need to add the key for our Alan AI Studio project. In Alan AI Studio, at the top of the code editor, click Integrations and copy the code provided in the Alan SDK Key field.

Then paste the copied code between the quotes:

main.dart¶

class _MyHomePageState extends State<MyHomePage> {
  _MyHomePageState() {
    /// Init Alan AI button with project key from Alan AI Studio
    AlanVoice.addButton(
      "976d23299e2cfbc77d43485dbc3cb44a2e956eca572e1d8b807a3e2338fdd0dc/stage",
      buttonAlign: AlanVoice.BUTTON_ALIGN_LEFT);

    /// Handle commands from Alan AI Studio
    AlanVoice.onCommand.add((command) {
      debugPrint("got new command ${command.toString()}");
    });
  }
}

Run the app.

After the app is built, it will be launched on the emulator or connected device. In the bottom left corner, tap the Alan AI button and say: Hello world.

However, if you try to ask: How are you doing? The AI assistant will not give an appropriate response. This is because the dialog script in Alan AI Studio does not contain the necessary voice commands so far.

Step 3: Add voice commands¶

Let’s add some voice commands so that we can interact with Alan AI. In Alan AI Studio, open the project and in the code editor, add the following intents:

Dialog script¶

intent('What is your name?', p => {
    p.play('It is Alan, and yours?');
});

intent('How are you doing?', p => {
    p.play('Good, thank you. What about you?');
});

Now in the app tap the Alan AI button and ask: What is your name? and How are you doing? Alan AI will give responses we have provided in the added intents.

What’s next?¶

You can now proceed to building a voice interface with Alan AI. Here are some helpful resources:

Have a look at the next tutorial: Navigating between screens in a Flutter app.
Go to Dialog script concepts to learn about Alan AI’s concepts and functionality you can use to create a dialog script.
In Alan AI Git, get the Flutter example app. Use this app to see how integration for Flutter apps can be implemented.
In Alan AI Git, get the Flutter Shrine app. Use this app to explore how a voice interface for a shopping app can be organized. To get dialog scripts for this example app, in Alan AI Studio, click Create New Project and select Flutter Shrine Example.