Amazon Echo/Alexa

[Vendittelli]

I saw that someone managed to turn their raspberry pi into an Amazon Echo and was wondering whether anyone was interested?

I can’t work on it until after exams (yay student life). So if somebody wanted to try it in the interim then I thought I’d throw the suggestion out there!

[MichMich]

Well, I’m not specifically interested in a Amazon Echo plugin. But I do want to built a voice recognition plugin. Unfortunately, I’m still looking for a simple, stable and powerful recognition library that plays nice with Electron and doesn’t need any Python (or other external solutions …).

[KirAsh4]

I feel this bit is mandatory. It comes courtesy of a friend who happens to have their house wired up and then this exchange happened one night:

Her: "XBox, turn off all lights"
Lights stay on
Her (louder): "XBox, turn off all lights!"
Lights stay on
Kid4: "Mum, lights are Alexa, not XBox. Alexa, turn off all lights"
Lights turn off
Alexa: "okay"

[MichMich]

@KirAsh4 lol.

[joerod]

Voice control will be great, I’d be super interested in this. I know there is a fork of this MagicMirror that does user voice control with googles API. The problem with this is that google only allows 50 API calls a day and there is no option to even buy more calls. As you can imagine the 50 calls get used up pretty quickly.

I’ve seen another Mirror that uses Jasper which is open source and does not have the API limitation, but I found this application difficult to install.

[nhubbard]

I was thinking more like Wit.ai, but that would be a little complicated to add. It requires you to make your own system, but you could automate anything you want using your mirror as the audio input source!

[Nichollsg]

Hey, I am actually interested in adding Amazon Alexa at some point, and I found a tutorial for adding this. Once I finish some other stuff going on, I will be back to start working on combining the magic mirror with amazon Alexa. I think the most difficult thing is going to be getting Alexa to feed stuff directly into the magic mirror. I am looking to have her used to search and play podcast videos from NPR/YouTube, but I think this might be a bit too much for the mirror- at least for right now.

[patm189]

I thought I heard somewhere that the Alexa’s open source software doesn’t actually allow for voice activation, but rather a button must be used to activate voice commands… perhaps that’s incorrect. I’d love to add voice command to my mirror.

[paviro]

@patm189 maybe CMU Sphinx could be used as the always listening part and as a button for Amazon Echo.

[Nichollsg]

@patm189 I see why that might be an inconvenience, and I feel the same. I would much rather use something similar to just saying “OK Google” or “Alexa, turn on…” to activate the service. However, if this is true then I will find a way to use the MMM-Button to activate it and have the omxplayer either activate default the first time the screen comes on after a certain time or change the number of times the button has to be pressed for each. Either way, I think any voice recognition software would be a cool addition to the mirror!