Andrew Heinzman
If an old fashioned swear jar isn’t enough to curb your sailor mouth, it’s time to ask the Swear Bear for a helping hand. Developed by 8 Bits and a Byte, Swear Bear is a Raspberry Pi-powered AI that keeps track of your profanity and shames you every time it hears a dirty word. Oh … fiddlesticks.
Teaching a stuffed animal to recognize profanity is not an easy task. Still, creators 8 Bits and a Byte managed to do it using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, a first-generation Google AIY Voice Kit, a microphone, and the Profanity Check Python library. Swear Bear also uses ThingSpeak and Google Cloud to keep a record of your potty mouth, and it uses a pair of speakers to mutter “oh dear” every time it hears profanity.
Anyone can assemble a Swear Bear using 8 Bits and a Byte’s Instructables guide. Of course, there’s a lot of flexibility in this design. You can change Swear Bear’s “oh dear” reaction to something more threatening, for example, or keep the bear offline instead of connecting it to the cloud. And as the Raspberry Pi Foundation notes in its coverage, you could even substitute the first-gen Google AIY Voice Kit with a newer, slimmer Google AIY Voice Kit Version 2.
Swear Bear might be a bit of a square, but he’s easy to build and could be a fun project for kids or beginner programmers. Pick out an old stuffed animal, order a Google AIY kit, and open up the Instructables guide to build your own profanity-discouraging friend.
Source: 8 Bits and a Byte via Raspberry Pi Foundation
