10 ms·

Amazon Provides DIY Echo Plans for Raspberry Pi

461 points by rpdillon 11y ago

Implicated 11y ago
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 11y ago
  Well, isn't the point here that you can verify that it isn't listening except when you want it to?
  - criddell 11y ago
    That's a great point. A little openness can only help Amazon sell even more of these things. I don't have one, but everybody I know who does really likes it.
  - CaptSpify 11y ago
    You do have more control, sure, but its still cloud dependent
    - jMyles 11y ago
      But you can hard-interrupt the microphone. I mean it's a completely different dynamic as far as security.
      - CaptSpify 11y ago
        Sure, But you still have to send your data through their API
torbjorn 11y ago
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?
- deegles 11y ago
  Haven't tried it yet, but I hear Pocketsphinx has a keyword spotting mode. https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx
  - alexcaps 11y ago
    Look into OpenEars. It's pretty crummy but it's free :/
- chrisper 11y ago
  You could use a bluetooth remote with 1 button or so to trigger that listening. I don't think the RPI is powerful enough to do voice recognition.
  - llamataboot 11y ago
    It is indeed for a limited number of phrases! I have used it that way for at least 2 years with Jasper and PocketSphinx
- incongruity 11y ago
  This actually sounds more like my ideal. I've heard the anecdotes about Alexa responding erroneously when people weren't home and doing things like turning the furnace on, etc. That combined with the general privacy concerns make me much more comfortable with being able to push a button to get her to listen – but I'd rather it be a button on my person – like on my fitbit, watch, etc. – easy, always available – plus maybe a way to turn it on for listening over a duration – say while cooking.
escobar 11y ago
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)
- x5n1 11y ago
  Agreed, I think this can be generalized to say that this should be the case with all these cloud services. The hardware should be open source, so you can at least control that part. At least you have that much control over the cloud APIs.
- JohnBooty 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      Just needs a vocera badge integration and a connection to Coding Insight from Talix to allow for NLP voice access to patient records...
  - halite 11y ago
eiopa 11y ago
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.
- jxy 11y ago
  Does it mean that we can run it on any computer that runs Java? I read through the tutorial but couldn't find anything that specifically tied to raspberry pi.
  - rtpg 11y ago
    Probably. The nice thing about the Pi is that it's cheap and has crazy low energy consumption
  - mnglkhn2 11y ago
    the trick left for the "makers" is to add a button to Raspberry Pi that will let you press it and have the app "listen" to your voice.
- Nexxxeh 11y ago
  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?
  - jjwiseman 11y ago
    Yes, but it won't work as well as the Echo, especially in a noisy environment.
    - jjwiseman 11y ago
      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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
daveloyall 11y ago
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.
blacksmith_tb 11y ago
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
dperfect 11y ago
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
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  Yeah, if anyone found something equivalent to the Echo in mic tech that I can hook up to my own setup, I'd die to know. That's the one thing I can't really replicate on my own system.
- Swizec 11y ago
  > 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?
haack 11y ago
Out of curiosity, does anyone know what amazon's incentive is to do this?
- lotso 11y ago
  Guessing they'd make more money off of people ordering products through any echo device than they would on their own hardware?
- nerfhammer 11y ago
  Hypothetically, amazon wants to make money of what people use echo for and not the hardware itself.
- sisk 11y ago
  I'd imagine the incentive is more points for the speech recognition model. The race is for who can handle completely unstructured speech best, and the field is vast at this stage.
- atarian 11y ago
  A direct response to Google opening their Voice Recognition API?
- freyr 11y ago
  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.
- make3 11y ago
  Like with their hackable instant order button, I would expect that at least for the short term, they want to use it as a way to make purchasing as fast and easy as possible, obviously to maximize their income. Longer term, conversational AI is clearly the next huge thing in sales and customer interaction, and they probably want to start progressively building grounds in that domain
jarmitage 11y ago
Would there be a way to dodge the privacy issues with this, by spoofing the service somehow?
- sp332 11y ago
  I suppose, if you feel like implementing all the API calls yourself on your own server.
danifel 11y ago
What I think you guys are really looking for is something like this: http://www.microsemi.com/products/audio-processing/home-automation/zl38062 http://www.microsemi.com/products/audio-processing/home-auto.... Ambarella uses those in their IP Cameras designs, so it should be straight forward to integrate...
sp332 11y ago
Does anyone know a way to use the Android Alexa app without buying an Echo device or Fire TV first?
- schlarpc 11y ago
  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.
newman314 11y ago
Self-signed cert? Miss opportunity for Amazon to push Let's Encrypt...
- thesimon 11y ago
  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-manager-deploy-ssltls-based-apps-on-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/new-aws-certificate-mana...
regularfry 11y ago
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?
Irishsteve 11y ago
Anyone know how to buy one if based outside the US
brooklyndude 11y ago
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. :-)
dharma1 11y ago
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?

461 points by rpdillon 11y ago

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 11y ago
Well, isn't the point here that you can verify that it isn't listening except when you want it to?
- criddell 11y ago
  That's a great point. A little openness can only help Amazon sell even more of these things. I don't have one, but everybody I know who does really likes it.
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  You do have more control, sure, but its still cloud dependent
  - jMyles 11y ago
    But you can hard-interrupt the microphone. I mean it's a completely different dynamic as far as security.
    - CaptSpify 11y ago
      Sure, But you still have to send your data through their API

torbjorn 11y ago

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?

deegles 11y ago
Haven't tried it yet, but I hear Pocketsphinx has a keyword spotting mode. https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx
- alexcaps 11y ago
  Look into OpenEars. It's pretty crummy but it's free :/
chrisper 11y ago
You could use a bluetooth remote with 1 button or so to trigger that listening. I don't think the RPI is powerful enough to do voice recognition.
- llamataboot 11y ago
  It is indeed for a limited number of phrases! I have used it that way for at least 2 years with Jasper and PocketSphinx
incongruity 11y ago
This actually sounds more like my ideal. I've heard the anecdotes about Alexa responding erroneously when people weren't home and doing things like turning the furnace on, etc. That combined with the general privacy concerns make me much more comfortable with being able to push a button to get her to listen – but I'd rather it be a button on my person – like on my fitbit, watch, etc. – easy, always available – plus maybe a way to turn it on for listening over a duration – say while cooking.

escobar 11y ago

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)

x5n1 11y ago
Agreed, I think this can be generalized to say that this should be the case with all these cloud services. The hardware should be open source, so you can at least control that part. At least you have that much control over the cloud APIs.
JohnBooty 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    Just needs a vocera badge integration and a connection to Coding Insight from Talix to allow for NLP voice access to patient records...
- halite 11y ago

eiopa 11y ago

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.

jxy 11y ago
Does it mean that we can run it on any computer that runs Java? I read through the tutorial but couldn't find anything that specifically tied to raspberry pi.
- rtpg 11y ago
  Probably. The nice thing about the Pi is that it's cheap and has crazy low energy consumption
- mnglkhn2 11y ago
  the trick left for the "makers" is to add a button to Raspberry Pi that will let you press it and have the app "listen" to your voice.
Nexxxeh 11y ago
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?
- jjwiseman 11y ago
  Yes, but it won't work as well as the Echo, especially in a noisy environment.
  - jjwiseman 11y ago
    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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

daveloyall 11y ago

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.

blacksmith_tb 11y ago

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

dperfect 11y ago

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

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
Yeah, if anyone found something equivalent to the Echo in mic tech that I can hook up to my own setup, I'd die to know. That's the one thing I can't really replicate on my own system.
Swizec 11y ago
> 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?

haack 11y ago

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

lotso 11y ago
Guessing they'd make more money off of people ordering products through any echo device than they would on their own hardware?
nerfhammer 11y ago
Hypothetically, amazon wants to make money of what people use echo for and not the hardware itself.
sisk 11y ago
I'd imagine the incentive is more points for the speech recognition model. The race is for who can handle completely unstructured speech best, and the field is vast at this stage.
atarian 11y ago
A direct response to Google opening their Voice Recognition API?
freyr 11y ago
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.
make3 11y ago
Like with their hackable instant order button, I would expect that at least for the short term, they want to use it as a way to make purchasing as fast and easy as possible, obviously to maximize their income. Longer term, conversational AI is clearly the next huge thing in sales and customer interaction, and they probably want to start progressively building grounds in that domain

jarmitage 11y ago

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

sp332 11y ago
I suppose, if you feel like implementing all the API calls yourself on your own server.

danifel 11y ago

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

sp332 11y ago

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

schlarpc 11y ago
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.

newman314 11y ago

Self-signed cert? Miss opportunity for Amazon to push Let's Encrypt...

thesimon 11y ago
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-manager-deploy-ssltls-based-apps-on-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/new-aws-certificate-mana...

regularfry 11y ago

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?

Irishsteve 11y ago

Anyone know how to buy one if based outside the US

brooklyndude 11y ago

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. :-)

dharma1 11y ago

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?