I developed an Amazon Echo Skill (app) that is able to send simple commands to Arduinos allowing you to pretty much voice activate anything.
My code is just the bridge between the two systems but it has so many possible applications, you can use it to make almost anything voice activated, your home theater, your kitchen, anything you design your Arduino to control. Quite simply let out your inner tony stark and build your own JARVIS.
Note: currently the system does have some limitations:
It is only able to send an unsigned long (due to the protocol I am using to send the data(NearBus), so if you know a better one(one that can send strings) that is about as simple and free I would love to know) so on the server side you have to use a switch statement to take the spoken input and translate it into a number and then the Arduino does that command number. I am investigating a way to use that single unsigned long into multiple commands but it will still be limited to numbers.
To learn more visit my website or check it out on GitHub.
Cool! How's your development coming along? I visited your webpage but didn't see much recent progress. I thought there would be more postings about Amazon Echo, but yours is the only one I see so far where anyone has connected an Amazon Echo more or less directly to an Arduino. Does your approach have significantly lower lag than going through IFTTT?
I went to near bus and got there "hello world" working . Lag time is about a second. I think it is much faster than IFTTT.
The cool thing about near bus is that there is a transparent mode so a user can turn on/off a pin with any browser by entering a url.
I got a raspberry pi going that is using the armzilla-echo-ha-bridge on my local lan. with that I can set up a "sudo switch" that the echo thinks is real. When I tell the echo to turn it on, it fires of the custom url and it hits near bus and turns on arduino pin. The cool thing about this is my arduino can be on a completely different network and I can set pins remotely by voice via the echo.
If you are interested
the armzilla-echo-ha-bridge is on the github
And Will has Near Bus mentioned pretty well on his blog.
(disclaimer, I don't know much about arduino, and even less with the raspberry pi... So if I could walk through these folk's work and get something going, I think anyone could depending on hard you want to figure it out )
I originally wanted to control my directv with the echo. The armzilla made this possible
there is maybe a second or two delay.... Directv is sort of slow, so it may have took it two seconds with the remote.
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