Sometimes people need automated mechanical robots

Jul 27, 2015 13:12 GMT  ·  By

Amazon's Echo, or Alexa, is a voice controlled device that can play music, set reminders, get answers for your questions. Unfortunately, Alexa will not be able to do automated stuff for you unless you speak to her. YouTuber Guillermo Amaral managed to hack Alexa to say what he wants.

Apparently, Amazon's echo comes with a lot of great features like being able to check mail, do online shopping for you, play music and set reminders; but to actually to this automatically, one must find workarounds by using a Raspberry Pi mini-computer that will speak commands to Amazon Echo remote.

The Echo's remote can act as a portable microphone in case one moves around the house and needs Alexa to do something beyond audio range. Tie that remote to a Raspberry Pi programmable mini-PC coupled with a mini speaker and Alexa will receive all the programmed information you'll introduce in Raspberry at any given time. Basically, the Raspberry talks to Alexa and Alexa interprets it as a human talking to her and she'll report to you regularly whether you have mail, weather, news and so on.

Amazing Alexa must learn to keep a schedule

Running Raspberry Pi on RPi buildroot software with eSpeak text-to-speech synthesizer, the computer will speak a command that will be sent to a headphone, which is, of course, placed conveniently on Echo's remote control microphone. The microphone is wired to the Pi as well so that it knows when to expect a voice command. In the end the command is sent to Alexa and she'll respond to the command.

The end result is that you won't hear anything Raspberry Pi says, but you'll hear Echo's response. This way the automation is complete, and although it looks a bit primitive, it does its job quite well without touching or saying anything to Alexa, or any third party running on Echo itself.