Doorbells are so last century. While watching an episode of the futuristic, sci-fi thriller Extant, I realized that the future of the doorbell is now! In the episode, a voice, presumably the product of some smart home automation system, announces that a visitor is at the front door. Easily achievable with a Raspberry Pi and some Python code!
Our future-is-now speaking doorbell uses a Raspberry Pi with a simple input circuit wired to our existing doorbell button. When a visitor presses the doorbell, the Raspberry Pi does a number of things: Firstly, it pauses the currently playing video and displays an on-screen message on both of our media center PC’s. Then, using a text-to-speech converter on the living room media PC, it announces that there is a visitor at the front door. And finally, an on-screen video from an IP camera mounted at the front door is displayed on both TV’s.