 Hi, this is Michael Lewis. I'm the CEO at Microsoft AI and In our first installment of who are you and what are you doing here? I'd like to introduce Mike Hansen he's the newest member of our development team and I just want to Talk to him a little bit about why he's here and you know what his interest in in Microsoft is so He's he's the creator of the raspy project and so I'd like to ask you Mike, you know, what was your motivation for for getting into that? Sure So I actually got I got some hardware I was working at the Air Force Research Lab got some raspberry pies and the condition for me getting these was that I needed to teach Raspberry Piking out for kids and I Actually enjoyed teaching so I thought no big deal So I did that and we were I put home assistant on this pies and then wanted to do a little voice assistant as well Kind of an offline thing and I found a project called Jasper But it didn't work so well And so I thought well, maybe I could improve this a little bit So I got something that worked pretty well for me But unfortunately it turns out if you have 20 20 10th graders in a single room all trying to talk to Their voice assistants doesn't doesn't work out so well But I enjoyed the experience and I kind of kept kept at it. I put the code up as an open source add-on and Then just kind of worked on it in the background but then kind of when COVID Shut down the Air Force Base and I moved remote. I was able to work, you know much more on raspy With the approval of my boss and just found that I loved it and So over time I decided, you know what I want to make this my full-time job and That's kind of where I am today What now my understanding is that raspy is The goal is to make that entirely offline, right? So there's no server connections for that. Why is that? well, the idea was Basically so that if somebody wanted to cut out, you know, any kind of third-party Listening to their voice or anything and they could do that. So there's a privacy aspect But for me there was also like a Kind of a robustness aspect to it I had read about people who you know sometimes people who don't have full mobility or something who might use voice Assistance around their home to help them and I remember reading a blog post by a gentleman who said, you know when the internet goes out I I have a huge problem And so I thought, you know the technology I felt like was far enough along that we could do this fully offline Now this can't do everything, you know, it's It's still limited in its in its own commands that it can take but it's still like it's way better than it was back in Back in the days of even the Raspberry Pi one So so there's a privacy aspect and then also the robustness for big things Yeah, that's that's great What so you recently joined microp just a couple of weeks ago What you know, what was what was it about? What we're doing here at microp that that really interests you well, it's it kind of It would be like the the dream for me as as the creative raspy to become something like a mycroft right, you know to to be able to Reach a large community of people Like with with open-source software to be able to provide, you know a private service to people and to to work on You know the hardware so I'm excited to work on the mark to Something we struggled with in the raspy community was you know, everyone has such diverse hardware They're trying to get this level of performance on but if you don't have You know the nice microphone that's tied to the speakers and such it makes it for a degraded experience I think and so I'm excited to To join a company that actually embraces kind of the values that I had in starting raspy the privacy aspect And such and can kind of come into a large community. It's great What do you think you can bring from the raspy project into mycroft? Well, I'm hoping to bring a number of things. I've I've worked on Getting things to run offline is is the big one. So raspy speech to text can run offline You pre-program it with a with a grammar right now They can still have millions of voice commands, but it's it's it's restrictive. So I'd like to bring Some of that and expand it out and then I've also worked on text to speech So I've I've trained at this point dozens of voices in different languages And those those are able to run offline as well on the Raspberry Pi hardware So the offline aspect is a big one and then I'm also interested down the road You know, my my background is in cognitive science as well as computer science. I'm interested in how we can Kind of take voice assistance a bit further than you know, right now a lot of them are basically chatbots with You know voice components stuck on either end But I think we can develop things that has a real dialogue with the user and can do more That's I'm interested in that aspect awesome well, I for one I'm very excited to have you on the team and Thank you for jumping into you know the the startup experience, which is always very exciting But Yeah, this this all sounds great. I mean, it's you know for us. It's a it's a perfect alignment And you know really glad to have you on the team. So thanks Thanks for the chance to get to know you a little better too. Sure. They excited to see where we go. All right. Thanks