Not very familiar with MQTTother then that a few micro boards I use like the ESP8266 can comeready for it. I mean just set up a voice key word to toggle a pin on the raspberry Pi to control a relay. With the VoiceHAT you just setup a word in a Python program, simple. In Picroft, you do a similar thing. Here I toggle an LED with the VoiceHAT; for example, https://plus.google.com/115226830543207487087

MQTT is a simple protocol for publishing/subscribing to events (over a network if you like). The Python clients on https://github.com/mqtt/mqtt.github.io/wiki/libraries look like they all have examples of a simple "run this python function whenever XYZ message happens" program.

It is the same with our platform, you can bind to the "hotword detected" message and run the code you want

I'd love to try it out, just don;t know how to doit honesty, nor how to add an MQTT handlerfor that matter. I can install and run programs on the Pi, and wire relays to pins, that's about it.

Take a look at https://github.com/snipsco/snips-platform-documentation/tree..., it is as simple as

pip install paho-mqtt

and writing a dozen line of Python!

I already run an MQTT broker for home automation stuff. How hard would it be to tell Snips to talk to that?

It is actually configurable, and as the platform is open and extensible it won't be too hard. For now you can have your broker send some messages on our MQTT bus, but later we will make this fully configurable