3 different Alexa modules, which one is the best?

rchase

Theres these:

magic-mirror-voice by whyjustin
MMM-Alexa by sakirtemel
MMM-MirrorMirrorOnTheWall by joanaz

I’m leaning toward
MMM-MirrorMirrorOnTheWall by joanaz
Alexa voice control to show/hide modules, search for images or Youtube video, and display them with the search term on the mirror.

By the way, it can play youtube videos not just show the thumbnail right? Sounds awesome

cowboysdude

I would read them all, check the forums for issues and see how they’re answered and handled :)

lucallmon

@rchase it depends on what you want to do. Good luck getting MMM-Mirrormirroronthewall to actually work. Have you looked at the github repository? There is no clear installation instructions. Your best bet is to install AlexaPi separate from MM then install the module MMM-AlexaPi.

rchase

@lucallmon ah bummer I hope I can get it to work with all the features it says it has

To me this Alexa module is the only reason Im interested in Magic Mirror, a mirror that shows a clock and weather info is kind of neat but doesnt justify its cost at all to me, however being able to turn my Belkin Wemo lights on/off with Alexa commands, being able to do quick google searches, get answers to short fact based questions by voice, pull up a youtube video with a voice command, thats where the magic mirror makes sense to me, those are the features im looking for

If anyone reading this is using alexa as i described i would like to hear your experience with it and if it is working as you expected!

The_Mingler

@rchase
I have alexa on my mirror and I used MirrorMirrorOnTheWall. It works well once you get through the oddly non-linear instructions. You have to do one thing on one page and make sure you did another group of to-do’s on another page and so on and in the end hope you hit everything. All in all though I find it very useful as I think Alexa is a powerful platform to have at your disposal. You can enable the full library of Alexa apps (and even your own custom Alexa apps in development mode). I modified the MirrorMirrorOnTheWall app (an awful lot) to have a lot more functionality and a little more practicality. In doing so I realized that when you do I don’t have experience with the other Alexa ports to the MM but with MMonTW I felt that every time I wanted to add even some basic functionality there were a ton of steps. I have to change the intent schema, then the invocation utterances, then the function that is triggered, then push it to the registered Iot device (which is your pi from when you were setting it up), but then you need to make sure you are subscribing to that specific topic there. It can be cumbersome but all in all when you know your way around it and you have an amazon alexa in your mirror it is pretty cool. I’d say go for it. Though its been months since I did mine and I am preparing for a 3000 mile move so I might not be as much help as I’d like to be if you get stuck.

rchase

@The_Mingler Great this is exactly what I was hoping to hear, thanks! Have you ever pulled up a Youtube video through an Alexa command and does that work as expected? That sounds like one of the coolest things to me

The_Mingler

@rchase
Yeah I thought that was one of the more attractive features of it. It was cool! I had to make a few tweaks to clear the screen afterwards though. It always pulls the same video for a search term (the first video in the search results), but this can be fixed programmatically to pull a random video in the top 5 or 10 results, or a specific video number in the results (but for that you need to change the utterances to accept a number as well and pass that into the function). But yeah, it was cool! One recommendation is read the instructions, and read them again. If you are like the rest of us on here, you kinda read and then you sorta skip to the numbered instructions and go from there. You need to read the paragraphs and the forum and they will tell you everything you need to know. But yeah it is pretty awesome.

Oh yeah, in order to have Alexa active for the MMonTW to work properly, there are three scripts (including an authentication one with Amazon) that need to be running. I usually start these up manually and haven’t looked into auto-starting them upon pi startup (like most do with their mirror). Hopefully that is possible.

rchase

@The_Mingler Nice! Alright that sounds pretty sweet though.

Anyone successfully controlled some Belkin WeMo stuff from Alexa? I feel like it wont be too hard to get this part figured out, since WeMo claims its supported anyways, I just dont know if there is extra configuration running from an RPI vs a normal echo/dot

lucallmon

@rchase check out my MM build here and you can see how mine works. If you want to try and learn what you can about the MirrorMirrorOnTheWall module, try here but good luck.

romain

Well, good luck. I try to make Alexa work from quite sometime now and I still getting any result. I tryed both MMM-Alexa and MMM-MirrorMirrorOnTheWall . Both module have incomplete instruction to me. They explain how to setup some stuff but not how to test it. So… even after following all the instruction I could find, I just end up stupidly talking in my mic with no answer or whatever. And no instruction on what should happen. How to know if AlexaPi is correctly installed ? no clue. How do I know that the module is well config within the mirror ? I guess you’ll know when you figure it out by yourself.
I would like a step by step video from someone doing it to see if my “issues” are hardware related or software related (I mean, if the issue is my mic not being picked up or if my config is wrong.) If I could “see” someone doing it, I could see what I am doing wrong.

Anyway. Best of luck