My Talk from BathCamp April 2016 on Alexa, The Amazon Echo and controlling a Smart Home.

1. HOME AUTOMATION AND
AMAZON ALEXA
BATHCAMP - APRIL 2016

2. SAM MACHIN
DEVELOPER ADVOCATE
SAM.MACHIN@NEXMO.COM
@SAMMACHIN

3. Do you want automation,
or just control?

4. MANY ‘THINGS’ MULTIPLE FUNCTIONS
User Controls
Sensors
Appliances
Notifications
Mediation

5. DISTRIBUTED MULTI VENDOR SYSTEM
▸ Nobody wants everything in their home from one supplier.
▸ Different Systems work in different ways
▸ There’s a market for services and products to glue stuff
together.
▸ Tech standards are good but its all about commercial
relationships.

6. VOICE IS THE UI OF
THE FUTURE

7. ALEXA
▸ Amazons Platform
▸ Originally Just the Echo
▸ Built as a Home Assistant not part
of a phone.
▸ Alexa is the service Echo is the
device

8. SIMPLE DEVICE CONTROL DEMO
+

9. “ALWAYS LISTENING??”
▸ The Echo uses a ‘wake word’
▸ The low level HW is always listening for this audio trigger
▸ Echo then records/streams your command to Amazons
Servers
▸ On silence/pause it stops and processes
▸ The wake word can be: Alexa, Amazon or Echo only

10. ALEXA ALL THE THINGS
Amazon Echo Dot Amazon Tap
Amazon Echo
Triby CoWatch HeadsUP

11. ALEXA VOICE SERVICE
▸ Amazon Developer API’s to add an Alexa Client to
‘anything’
1. Record Speech
2. Send to API
3. Playback Response

12. “THE $10 ECHO”
▸ Started out by putting Alexa onto a CHIP
▸ Uses a Physical Button instead of Wake Word
▸ Ported to The Raspberry Pi as AlexaPi
https://github.com/sammachin/alexapi

13. WHAT CAN ALEXA DO
▸ Set Alarms & Timers
▸ Control Devices
▸ Music /Audiobooks Playback
▸ Ask Questions
▸ Order Pizza & Uber!
▸ Anything you can write!!!!

14. ALEXA SKILLS KIT
▸ These are Alexa’s ‘Apps’
▸ Launched Aug 2015
▸ The store still has very limited functionality
▸ Orchestration of Multiple Apps on one Alexa account is
not quite right yet

15. ALEXA SKILLS KIT
▸ Skills are best built on Lambda but can be your own HTTPS
server
▸ Alexa passes the app a JSON object with commands
▸ App returns text to be spoken or audio file
https://bit.ly/alexalambda

16. ALEXA + TESLA + SMART HOME + GOLANG = WINNING THE INTERNET
http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-s-voice-command-amazon-echo/

17. SAM MACHIN
DEVELOPER ADVOCATE
SAM.MACHIN@NEXMO.COM
@SAMMACHIN