Very cool! If you want to do this in a 100% on-device and private-by-design way, you can take a look at what we are building at https://snips.ai (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder)
It runs on a Raspberry Pi 3, or any Linux, osX, iOS, Android device, and it works in English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and more coming soon!
We'd love to show what you are building on our blog if you want to use it :)
Second the recommendation for Snips. I recently built a Snips-based voice assistant for hands-free oscilloscope control (https://github.com/jmwilson/ollie), and snips is a much better fit for this kind of domain-specific, field-deployable (offline) voice assistant.
Consider the whole of infrastructure required for this application. The Pi sends a request to Alexa, which sends a request to a lambda server, which sends a request to SQS, which is polled by the Pi. Each of those AWS servers has possible subsystems and some load balancer in front of it. Single device, offline processing is so much cleaner when there's no need for general connectivity.
I used a (Python) natural language parser of my own creation (this was before intent classification was a big thing), Nuance speech recognition, and a javascript (node) interface to the AR.Drone.
I also did this a few years ago - voice controlled drone, had some keyboard based kill switches, unfortunately the drone is quite noisy so had to talk quite loudly to get a decent STT translation.
Not bad! Be interesting to include this tech into a FPV drone headset which could yield serviceable complete heads-up control for area sightseeing. BTW hope you turned off the projected sniper's reticle during the demo as this does tend to elicit angst in the observers - sorry :-)
Someone actually already did a Voice controlled drone with the platform https://github.com/trancept/snips_bebop/ :)
It runs on a Raspberry Pi 3, or any Linux, osX, iOS, Android device, and it works in English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and more coming soon!
We'd love to show what you are building on our blog if you want to use it :)