Living with and building for the Amazon Echo
Who wants to have a black box in their home (or bedroom!) that listens to every sound, connects to the internet and over which you have no control? Sure I believe Amazon when they say they only send clips of the actual commands, but how long before these things get rooted left and right?<p>I build my own version of this, which I can customize as I want. I can get the weather (my central home automation server pulls forecasts from wunderground.com, current temp from my own sensors, the voice control unit then pulls data from there), open&#x2F;close curtains and turn lights on&#x2F;off, and it says the time. I have a small list of other &#x27;dialogues&#x27; (as they&#x27;re called in my system) I&#x27;m going to add when I have some time, but I&#x27;m still figuring out what functionality is worthwhile.<p>My software is based on pocketsphinx on raspi, so it&#x27;s easy to put one in each room (I have only one now myself). I&#x27;m using a mxl ac404 teleconf mic, which works ok; you do have to speak up for it to pick up the commands. I&#x27;d love to get an echo to see how much better it works. I have a primitive &#x27;tts&#x27; system that plays back prerecorded messages, and falls back to festival for unknown words. I paid a voice actor a bit through fiverr to get the 100 or so words I need. Sounds better than full synthetic tts systems, although I need to work on improving the timing between words.<p>This is only a few days worth of work, too. It&#x27;s not hard to make. I&#x27;m not claiming my systems works as well as an echo, but I prefer the control mine gives me.