Also, how would alexa get information about things like the current location to give travel times etc?

I guess the end goal would be to have other modules controlling things like lighting (phillips hue?) and using the voice control to turn it on/off & change colour as an example.

@bhepler Are you running it from your pi or do you have the echo/dot?
If you are using the pi then yes you can customize the wake word which will trigger it into listening mode.

How did you customize the wake word? I’m using the Alexa AVS sample app on my Rpi3 which uses snowboy as the wakeword agent and everything is working great, but would love it if I didn’t have to use the name “alexa”!

Running the Alexa sample requires 3 terminal sessions -
one runs the companion service which stores the application token information and runs a listener on port 3000
one runs the java client under maven
One runs the wake word agent, running one of two engines - kitt_ai or sensory (I opted for kitt_ai)

I can’t tell at the moment, what information is returned by AVS, so it’s difficult to know if and how usable it is. It does support IFTTT however. Combining it with the MMM-IFTTT module, whilst not elegant, may be a workaround?

For what it’s worth, the install, whilst lengthy was fully automated and incredibly trouble free - it worked straight out of the box on a fresh Raspian install which already had a barebones MagicMirror2 install.

Also of note, every time I need to restart the java client, I am required to re-authenticate my device to get a new bearer/autentication token. These tokens do not seem to last that long and the authentication process involves logging into Amazon through a web page with an image security verification. No doubt that’s down to how this sample is implemented but might be worth knowing about

I’ve had Alexa tell me the day, a joke and asked her a maths question.

A quick demo (YouTube)

The detection is spot on and the response time is pretty acceptable

The sooner this can get made into a module the better :)

Edit: At last! through…

During the install, I see
Configuration file ‘/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf’
==> Modified (by you or by a script) since installation.
==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.
What would you like to do about it ? Your options are:
Y or I : install the package maintainer’s version
N or O : keep your currently-installed version
D : show the differences between the versions
Z : start a shell to examine the situation
The default action is to keep your current version.
*** lightdm.conf (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ?

I think I should answer ‘Y’ to keep the installer happy, but thought it worth checking - @d3r can I ask what you chose?

Or make it interactive:

“Hey Cheech!”
“Yes Chong?”

Oh, this is too awesome. My wife and were trying to get our echo to wake on “Hey Asshole” (it’s a literary reference, honest) and it wouldn’t let us. I’m going to get to work on a new mirror…