
The $10 Echo - espadrine
http://sammachin.com/the-10-echo/
======
sammachin
Thanks for all the upvotes folks,

I should clarify that there is a bit of artistic license on the title calling
this a $10 Echo, there are 2 caveats;

Its only about $10 the CHIP is a "$9 Computer" plus tax & shipping etc. and
this hack then requires a speaker, microphone and a button, however you may
well have these lying around of have another device like an old speakerphone
or something that you could gut and put the CHIP into as a new brain.

The other point is that its not really a full Echo, the Echo is a hardware
appliance that implements Far Field Voice Technology, Wake Word Detection, A
High Quality Bluetooth Speaker, Support for various media service (Prime
Music, Audible, Pandora etc) and finally the Alexa Voice Assistant. This hack
is really just access to the Alexa Voice Assistant without the wake word or
far field tech.

So its about 90% of the functionality for a much lower price. Personally I
have an Echo in my dining room which is great when walking around the house
but I built this to use on my desk when I want to trigger home automation
features without shouting downstairs.

~~~
vnwarrior
do you have the source for alexa in the browser on github ? that one was a
very cool hack!

~~~
sammachin
Yeah I just need to strip out the auth keys etc. and rebase it before i make
it public. I'll try and get it posted this week sometime, check back on weds.

------
dperfect
One of the more impressive things about the Echo is its far-field mic. I've
used a lot of different voice recognition technologies, but Echo blows
everything else away in terms of being able to speak in a normal voice _from
the other side of the room_ and have it still understand you. The actual
intelligence behind the service may be lacking (or at least behind some of the
competition), but for a general-purpose home application, the mic (in my
opinion) is a significant part of Echo's reliability and success.

~~~
Bjartr
In my limited experience using Echo at my parents house over the holidays I
was distinctly not impressed by the Echo's abilities to understand voice from
across the room. We often had to repeat ourselves, only louder and slower to
get the Echo to understand us. We do not have strong accents.

~~~
cs2818
Exact opposite for me, does a great job at recognizing speech but a horrible
job providing answers to even simple questions.

~~~
freyr
> _a horrible job providing answers to even simple questions._

If you think of it as a device that performs specific actions (i.e., plays
audio, gives a weather forecast, sets a timer, etc.) via an voice interface,
rather than a general intelligence that can answer random questions, you're
going to have a better time.

~~~
Daneel_
THIS. It baffles me how people expect devices such as the Echo to understand
every nuance of human language, then get annoyed when it can't answer your
overly-complex or vague question. Voice interfaces for me are always reduced
to clearly enunciated and simple commands such as "set timer 10 minutes" or
"play album Anjunadeep 4". You'll have a much better time than saying
"alexaplaymesomealbumsbyaboveandbyond"

~~~
lsaferite
Well, in fairness, Google does a much better job than Alexa at 'doing what I
want'

------
kovacs
This is a pretty cool experiment. As someone that recently worked on an app
that was doing speech to text in near and far field, calling this a $10 echo
is like calling a Honda Civic a $15K Ferrari. I'd love to see the video of the
author speaking to this microphone from 10' away, or even 5' away in a room
with no padding.

The Echo's ability to do voice to text is like nothing that's ever come before
it based on my experience building, and speaking with a consultant in the
field that worked on the Echo team.

~~~
sammachin
I totally agree, hence my comments about artistic license in the title! One of
the issues right now is that people kinda assume that Echo and Alexa are the
same thing hopefully as more 3rd party devices come to market using Alexa the
difference will emerge. I'm thinking of doing a follow on post explaining the
differences. Also there's not really a generic name for the type of appliance
that the Echo is like smartphone, tablet, browser etc. I wonder if echo will
become like hoover in years to come?

~~~
kovacs
From your lips to Amazon's ears, they sure hope so :)

------
jimrandomh
I'm not comfortable with the idea of everyone having far-field microphones in
their homes. Cell phone spying is bad enough. If these become widespread, then
ten years from now instead of a political debate about call metadata it'll be
a debate about _literally every word ever spoken_.

~~~
njharman
> I'm not comfortable with the idea of everyone having far-field microphones
> in their homes.

That's the problem with progress and technology. It will happen regardless of
how comfortable you are with it. In fact, if it helps those with power to
maintain or extend their power it will happen. If it tends to limit their
power it will be squashed and marginalized.

~~~
dopeboy
False. Technology can proceed with privacy in mind. The Echo didn't have to
push things to the cloud. It was, however, constructed to do so both for
Amazon's benefit (data) and the consumer's benefit (ease of setup and use).

The trend you cite will happen because of ignorance, not progress.

~~~
bsimpson
It adds convenience to most services to connect to the Internet, so most of
the do by default. So long as the device is connected, state-sponsored actors
will find ways to eavesdrop even if the device wasn't originally designed to
send audio over the wire.

Citizenfour was eyeopening on this point.

------
alister
Any recommendations for microphones that are (a) high-quality, (b) cheap
(under US$5.00), (c) small (under a cubic centimeter), and (d) with analog
output (such as a 1/8-inch plug)?

Note that high-quality and cheap are not contradictory requirements. iPhones
and other smartphones have extremely high-quality microphones (and they are
_tiny_ ) and must certainly cost much less than $5 as a part, but they seem
impossible to find. Every off-the-shelf mic under $5 that I've tried has been
garbage in terms of sound quality, and even much more expensive ones have not
been great.

Good mics certainly exist. Here's a compact analog microphone I own that has
fantastic sound quality:

[http://www.amazon.com/Sony-Electret-Condenser-Microphone-
ECM...](http://www.amazon.com/Sony-Electret-Condenser-Microphone-
ECM-C115/dp/B00012FVRE)

But it's ridiculous that this microphone costs 6x as much as the CHIP and 10x
as the RPi Zero. You can't build a product around the CHIP or the RPi if an
essential part is that expensive.

~~~
bitJericho
This is my favorite cheap microphone. It does need to be fairly close, I'd say
within 5 feet:

[http://www.amazon.com/Cyber-Acoustics-100Hz-Microphone-
ACM-1...](http://www.amazon.com/Cyber-Acoustics-100Hz-Microphone-
ACM-1B/dp/B0000511GQ/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1451871749&sr=8-4&keywords=cyber+acoustics+microphone)

------
13of40
If the author of this is reading, it might help to make the first reference to
"Alexa" be a hyperlink to "what the heck is Alexa". (I know I can google it,
but...)

~~~
cookiecaper
"Alexa" is the assistant-in-the-machine that comes on the Amazon Echo (just as
an iPhone 6 comes with Siri). You activate the Echo by saying "Alexa". The
author is probably guessing that in context, you'll make the connection
between the title "The $10 Echo" and the Echo's hotword (Alexa).

I agree it'd be useful if there was a brief explanation at the beginning of
the article.

------
aaronbrethorst
Here's the service that this depends on:
[https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-
vo...](https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-voice-
service)

------
cek
If you want to try this in your browser, the guy who built this $10 device
also used the same APIs to put Alexa/Echo in the browser.

[http://sammachin.com/hacks-and-projects/alexa-in-the-
browser...](http://sammachin.com/hacks-and-projects/alexa-in-the-browser/)

------
chinathrow
That's great from the price perspective - I still would not want another
active listening device tied to a mega corp within my vicinity.

However, I would love to have an Echo like device which does the voice
recognition/algo crunching/etc on premise, i.e. on a server/device I control.

Is there anything out which does this nicely?

~~~
kordless
> I still would not want another active listening device tied to a mega corp
> within my vicinity.

I wish more people were like you and voiced their concerns about this ongoing
problem around centralization of services. However...see
[http://www.cultofmac.com/264381/hardware-siri-runs-puts-
new-...](http://www.cultofmac.com/264381/hardware-siri-runs-puts-new-mac-pro-
shame/):

> Over on Reddit, a post suggests that there are 3 main ‘instances’ (or server
> farms) for Siri in the United States, and at least one for every other
> country.

> This information allegedly comes — albeit second-hand — from Apple’s lead
> cloud architect, who says that every instance of Siri runs on 32 powerful HP
> servers with a total of 1024 cores and 32 terrabytes of RAM apiece. That
> certainly makes the new Mac Pro look long in the tooth.

> Specifically, each instance of Siri is made up of 4 HP c7k enclosures made
> up of 8 HP server blades each, with memory upgrades to 1TB of RAM.

> According to the post, if one server dies, it’s simply removed and another
> one slapped in, with no downtime.

Granted, there are a lot of people yacking at Siri at a given time, but still.
You probably need a fair amount of horsepower to pull this off.

~~~
icebraining
Apple has also said that Siri gets 1 billion requests per week, so by those
numbers each core can handle ~10k requests/week, using its share of 32GB of
RAM. Doesn't seem that much.

------
wsr
According to Alexa Voice Service page
([https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-
vo...](https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-voice-
service))

Amazon is starting a $100M fund for anyone building voice related services.
This is very interesting. Has any company been funded via this fund?

~~~
cek
The Alexa Fund page lists a sub-set of the companies that have received
funding from the fund so far:
[https://developer.amazon.com/appsandservices/solutions/alexa...](https://developer.amazon.com/appsandservices/solutions/alexa/alexa-
fund)

~~~
scholia
So how does Amazon make money from Alexa running on non-Amazon devices? (Not
obvious to me, sorry.)

~~~
bpicolo
It's going to evolve into a massive app ecosystem, surely with paid apps

~~~
soylentcola
It looks like you can use it for non-commercial purposes but I imagine that
they'd make money a few ways: indirectly through publicity and familiarity
(the more people are used to having it, the more might use Amazon's commercial
version or just Amazon stuff in general), directly (through licensing it for
commercial use), and via improvements they make to their service as a result
of people using the free version for non-commercial applications (better voice
training and interpretation).

That's just a guess but it's similar to what Google does with AOSP and Google
Android.

------
posharma
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Jasper [1]. Its a cool little but very
well organized project that I put together this Christmas.

[1] [http://jasperproject.github.io/](http://jasperproject.github.io/)

~~~
bgroins
You're surprised nobody has mentioned a project you organized less than 10
days ago?

~~~
posharma
No, I didn't organize it. The awesome people at Princeton did last year. Its
really awesome. I just downloaded and made my own this Christmas.

------
notlisted
I love my echo (alexa), especially the convenience of "no button but wake
word" when I have my hands full in the kitchen. That said, google voice is so
much better at parsing my questions that I'd pay a bunch of money for another
standalone device with wake word which would integrate with with google voice.
Any chance of hacking that, or linking your device with both? (Ask Amazon /
Ask Google)

~~~
squeaky-clean
Google's question parsing is ridiculously good. You can also do neat things
like say "When I get to work, remind me to email John" and you'll get a
notification when you arrive. I don't have an Echo, but I imagine it can't do
such contextual things.

You could get a dedicated Android phone/tablet, and leave it always plugged
into a charger somewhere. I just tested it on my Phone (LG G3 Android 5.0.1),
and I'm able to get my phone to respond to "Ok, Google" questions, even with
the screen off.

Though the microphone probably won't be nearly as good as the Echo, and from
the setup it seems like you have to train "Ok, Google" to respond to your
voice, so I don't know if it will work with multiple users.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I love my Nest Thermostat, and I know they've got "Protect" as the smoke/CO
detector. I'd LOVE if Google would release an "Assist" product that was the
Echo form factor powered by Google's agent engine, and I could mount it on the
ceiling in each of my rooms similar to how smoke detectors are (hard wired to
mains with battery backup).

Too much to hope for I suspect.

~~~
lsaferite
That would be both awesome and terrifying.

I have an Echo and the mic array is fantastic. And the idea of having one in
every room for localized interaction is great. But the idea of such a good mic
in every room is scary if you consider bad and/or state actors.

------
destitude
I've heard that the "$10" CHIP has a $20 "shipping" charge. Is that still the
case?

~~~
blacksmith_tb
I backed for just one board, and then they offered to let me add more without
paying additional shipping, so I added a second, $18 for the CHIPs, $5ish to
ship them. They are en route from China. To be fair, I only just succeeded in
ordering a Pi Zero from Adafruit, $5 for the Pi, $4 shipping...

------
blhack
Cool clock, Sam.

I have to be honest, I got an echo for Christmas (thanks Mom!), and while it's
really cool, it has only served to highlight how much amazon prime music
sucks. In fact, it has only served to highlight to me how disconnected cloud
music services are.

Google music has just about _everything_ (now that it is connected to
youtube), but amazon doesn't want to let its speakers play google music's
music service because they want to sell you their own.

The future is a strange place right now.

------
Animats
The $10 CHIP will be a $10 CHIP when and if it ships. Right now, it's a
Kickstarter claiming they will ship the thing in June 2016.

~~~
sammachin
Actually the kickstarter did ship hence why I had my hands on one (well two
actually) to do this hack. I backed the kickstarter back in May 2015.

The June2016 date is for orders placed on their store today which I think is
the earliest they currently expect to have filled all the current pre-orders
and later stage kickstarter backers. IIRC they're currently producing 5000
units a month.

------
grok2
This is another thing that makes you wonder why companies expose APIs to their
services that enablenothers to make competing services.

~~~
sp332
They can revoke your access at any time.

~~~
notyourwork
Reminds me of twitter awhile back.

------
zerr
I thought it was about experimental startup providing echo service for
$10/month subscription :)

------
colinramsay
I'm being a pedant but doesn't an Echo have a mic built in? Buying an
equivalent one would be ~£75 I think.

~~~
blhack
OP explained in a comment here that he was taking a bit of an artistic license
calling this an echo.

Echo _also_ is a pretty nice wireless speaker.

------
crimsonalucard
compared with ok google and siri, echo is not much better (if not worse) in
terms of intelligence. What made echo was the physical form factor.

Intelligence is hard to mimic, but physical form factor is not. All google or
apple needs to do is come out with with a similar speaker/mic combo and it
will totally blow echo out of the water.

~~~
Nicholas_C
I agree. I wish Google would build their own echo. The ability to do things
like manage a calendar, text people, and all the other "Ok, Google" functions
through an Echo-like device that also does what Amazon's Echo currently does
would be fantastic. Alexa can't even tell me what is the stock price of Amazon
and can't give me the current temperature without prattling off the entire
weather update.

~~~
soylentcola
I guess they've just focused on getting the functionality available on devices
you can already find (Android and iOS devices, TVs like the newer Sonys that
run AndroidTV, etc). I see the appeal of a standalone device but I find that
lots of times, the response may not translate well into audio-only so having a
screen helps when you ask something and the best answer is a graph, text, or
image.

Just a guess though. I'm surprised that wasn't included in that rather pricey
wifi router they launched recently. It has a decent sized speaker in it but
perhaps they decided not to enable it just yet. My guess is that they wanted
to start selling the wifi routers but didn't think the voice stuff was up to
snuff for a consumer application/selling point just yet.

