Microphone and speakers
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I am looking to add alexa to my magic mirror and was wondering if anyone could recommend a speaker and microphone setup that isn’t too crazy expensive.
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@dcarls91 If all you care about is having Alexa respond in voice, any speaker will do. If you’re using a TV for your monitor, then you can use its in-built speakers.
If you also want your mirror to play music, then sound quality is more important. Not sure how well a good speaker will sound buried behind the mirror frame. You’ll need to engineer clear sound pass-through into your frame.
As for the microphone, I’ve used a really cheap USB one ($5 on Amazon), and it worked fine for me, but it had a hard time with higher pitched voices like my wife’s or my kids.
Also know that you don’t get all of the features of a full-blown Amazon Echo when using something like AlexaPi. Continuous conversation is hit or miss, and if Alexa needs to go look up something, she sometimes doesn’t come back with an answer. Given how inexpensive Echo dots are, especially when they go on sale ($20), I’d personally buy one of those, and concentrate on writing integrations to make Alexa do stuff on my mirror via the API.
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I actually have an echo dot laying around. Just out of curiosity, is it very hard to integrate the echo dot to the mirror. I do not have alot of experience with things like that.
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@dcarls91 It’s been a while since I played with this, but if I recall correctly, I had to use a Heroku app as a relay between the Alexa skill and the mirror. Then I had a module on the mirror subscribe to the notifications that the Heroku app was putting out and react accordingly on the display.
