
Amazon Provides DIY Echo Plans for Raspberry Pi - rpdillon
https://github.com/amzn/alexa-avs-raspberry-pi
======
escobar
I have had reservations about the Echo line because of the whole "always
listening" thing, regardless of what anyone's said about how it's not
recording, how I can unplug it, etc. The whole "always listening" thing isn't
what interests me about playing with Alexa.

As someone who's spent a fair amount of time with hardware, I think this is
what will make me tinker with the Alexa service - I am interested to see what
it can do and I like keeping up with Amazon's hardware projects. I've got all
the parts lying around to throw this together without spending anything, so
it's a neat way for them to grab some interest from a different user
demographic. This also should be fairly easy to get running on a BeagleBone
too, which I tend to lean towards (more I/O, PRU can be useful)

~~~
JohnBooty
Looking at what Amazon's posted, it looks like what they've released doesn't
even give you the "always listening" option.

You have to click on the "start listening" button and then the "stop
listening" button.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Now all you need is a remote microphone in the shape of a star trek
communicator for your shirt pocket. Tap, "Alexa, three to beam aboard." :-)

~~~
samstave
Just needs a vocera badge integration and a connection to Coding Insight from
Talix to allow for NLP voice access to patient records...

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dperfect
This may bring me one step closer to my personal "holy grail" of home
automation: every room in the house[1] working with seamless voice-activated
home automation. This is what I'm ultimately after:

\- A cheap device (DIY if possible) in the form factor of a small plug-in
unit. Ideally the device itself should be practically "invisible" in each
room, and won't require any special home wiring. This is definitely in the
realm of possibility for a Raspberry Pi (or similar).

\- A microphone for the device that works at least as well as the Echo's far-
field mic. I have _not_ been able to find any good options for this, apart
from some obscure parts that are too expensive for me to test, let alone buy
for every room.

\- Software that allows for voice-activated operation. There's probably a
suitable workaround for doing this with the Alexa Voice Service now, though it
may require more CPU power than is available on the Raspberry Pi.

\- Ideally, I could host the voice service myself and wouldn't have to worry
about the privacy implications of going through someone like Amazon. I know
there are several existing software packages that claim to do this, but none
that I've found can match the quality of Echo/Alexa for everyday interaction.

\- Audio feedback does not need to be high quality, but at least audible. A
small speaker within the device is probably enough. For other areas of the
house, it would be nice for the output to be connected to a bluetooth speaker
in the room or a home audio system (if available).

The Echo Dot appears to be a pretty close match for this (though I haven't
tried it) - at least in terms of functionality, but the form factor still
seems a bit off. I'd rather have a self-contained plug-in unit than something
that sits on a desk or table.

[1] Or _most_ of the house anyway

~~~
Swizec
> is may bring me one step closer to my personal "holy grail" of home
> automation: every room in the house[1] working with seamless voice-activated
> home automation.

But why? What do you want to automate?

That's the part I never understood about this stuff. What is there to automate
in the first place?

~~~
modoc
Not the OP but here's some of the stuff I have/want:

Have:

Adding things to my shopping list (via Alexa - currently in the kitchen and
bathroom - two most frequent rooms where I'm like "hey I need more XXXX")

Changing the temperature (Nest via phone app and command line tool I wrote,
and now Alexa just did a native integration)

Finding out my schedule for the day.

Finding out the weather forecast for the day.

Playing music (via Sonos or Alexa)

Locking front door when I'm going to bed.

Getting notified of movement or sound in the house while I away (Nest Cam and
Smart Things)

......

Like the OP I'd love to have the voice control available in any room of the
house. I'd love to have better security features (i.e. if I drive up my
driveway at 3 AM turn on the outside lights, if a stranger drives up my
driveway at 3 AM WAKE ME UP WITH AN ALARM). I'd love better voice controlled
Sonos music selection. Composing emails, having handsfree phone or video
calls, warming up the oven at a certain time, etc...

~~~
alexcaps
It's not low cost yet, but check out [http://josh.ai](http://josh.ai).
Starting high end but price will drop significantly.

~~~
modoc
I will, thanks!

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eiopa
tl;dr:

It's literally a tutorial on configuring Alexa Voice Services + their sample
code on Debian.

The way you interact with it is by clicking on a button in a Java app. No
trigger phrase like Echo.

~~~
Nexxxeh
But presumably you could have the Pi listen for a trigger word or whistle or
whatever using software running locally, and when triggered, kick over to the
Alexa API?

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jjwiseman
Yes, but it won't work as well as the Echo, especially in a noisy environment.

~~~
jjwiseman
To expand a little on this: The Echo has a 7-microphone array which is crucial
to speech recognition accuracy. This gives it the best far-field recognition
ability of any consumer product I've seen, with the ability to stay accurate
even if you're across the room, with music playing. That's just the hardware,
and replicating it's abilities will not be easy.

On the software side, supposedly they're using Nuance for recognition. Nuance
isn't cutting edge: In the tests I've done, Nuance has a Word Error Rate (WER)
that's 10%-20% higher than Google's, but it's still much better than something
like Pocketsphinx or any other open source recognizer.

There are a lot of factors that go into making a speech interface a good
experience for users: Good recognition accuracy even with background noise,
good voice activity detection (even with background noise), very accurate word
spotting, low latency. It's hard to hit all these things well enough to make
the interface usable.

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torbjorn
This is awesome. I am strongly considering getting setting this up as I just
purchased a fresh raspberry pi.

The only limitation appears to be you have to click a "start listening" button
to get it to start recording audio. You can't simply say "Alexa" to get the
raspberry pi + alexa web service to listen for your query.

Anyone have any ideas for a work around/ solution to this?

~~~
gt565k
On a related note, check this project out.
[http://jasperproject.github.io/](http://jasperproject.github.io/)

You can perhaps trigger alexa to start listening through it by wiring the
voice recognition to click the "start listening" button.

~~~
soared
Jasper is outdated and incredibly difficult to install on any recent model (2,
3 or 0).

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Implicated
Privacy concerns aside, this is pretty damn cool.

I've been looking for an excuse to tinker with a raspberry pi for a while -
this seems like something I could have some fun with then give away to someone
less paranoid/concerned with the privacy issues.

~~~
jMyles
Well, isn't the point here that you can verify that it isn't listening except
when you want it to?

~~~
CaptSpify
You do have more control, sure, but its still cloud dependent

~~~
jMyles
But you can hard-interrupt the microphone. I mean it's a completely different
dynamic as far as security.

~~~
CaptSpify
Sure, But you still have to send your data through their API

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blacksmith_tb
Nice to see them walking through pretty much everything from getting your RPi
running to making it work with AVS. That said, Sam Machin's Python CHIP / RPi
client was there first, and has a smaller footprint:
[https://github.com/sammachin/AlexaCHIP](https://github.com/sammachin/AlexaCHIP)

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daveloyall
Props to Amazon for putting this up. There are hundreds of steps and a lot of
it is manual drudgery. 10/10 would hack again.

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haack
Out of curiosity, does anyone know what amazon's incentive is to do this?

~~~
freyr
The value is in Amazon's voice services and speech recognition platform, not
in the Echo device itself. As machine learning improves, voice and speech may
play a bigger part in user interaction, and Amazon wants to be out in front of
that.

The Echo hardware was just a way to get the ball rolling with this platform.

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danifel
What I think you guys are really looking for is something like this:
[http://www.microsemi.com/products/audio-processing/home-
auto...](http://www.microsemi.com/products/audio-processing/home-
automation/zl38062). Ambarella uses those in their IP Cameras designs, so it
should be straight forward to integrate...

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sp332
Does anyone know a way to use the Android Alexa app without buying an Echo
device or Fire TV first?

~~~
schlarpc
I'm able to use it on an account with only a device generated via the Alexa
Voice Service. I made a device profile on the developer site, then
authenticated to it via the OAuth flow.

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dharma1
Has anyone done hardware tinkering with the Echo? Does it run Linux? what does
the mic array look like? Possible to use just the mic array and pipe the audio
elsewhere?

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regularfry
Has anyone found a decent solution to hooking more than one mic input into an
RPi? Something that would allow doing some simple DSP across, say, a 4-input
array?

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brooklyndude
We have 100% totally pivoted on this one. Every proposal we put out, now has
Echo front and center. As we say "screens", you mean like your father/mother
used to use? How old school. A screen? Oh boy ... :-)

As Woz says, "bigger than the iPhone." That sounds like a hell of a prediction
to me. Woz knows all. :-)

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jarmitage
Would there be a way to dodge the privacy issues with this, by spoofing the
service somehow?

~~~
sp332
I suppose, if you feel like implementing all the API calls yourself on your
own server.

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newman314
Self-signed cert?

Miss opportunity for Amazon to push Let's Encrypt...

~~~
thesimon
For what reason? Amazon offers their own free certs [0] and I doubt you can
get an LE cert for a local IP address.

[0]: [https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/new-aws-certificate-
mana...](https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/new-aws-certificate-manager-
deploy-ssltls-based-apps-on-aws/)

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Irishsteve
Anyone know how to buy one if based outside the US

