Amazon Echo

Hello guys,

take a look at what Amazon released called Echo. http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo/ref_=ods_dp_ae

I can see a great voice control of Vera coming up if somebody would develop a plugin for that and/or integration into Tasker.

Watch the video please.

Waouh 8)
We have no idea if the device will be close or open.

[quote=“lolodomo, post:2, topic:183970”]Waouh 8)
We have no idea if the device will be close or open.[/quote]

You are correct but I would be very surprised if they lock this thing down. Amazon has so many published APIs e.g. S3, Glacier, etc and they are all published REST based APIs.

I don’t believe they will offer a local API so assuming they will go the REST path, the Vera plugin could work like the NEST initial release where you had to have internet connectivity which would be ok here anyway as ECHO requires the cloud to work like Google NOW does as well.

With all that said I can see great use cases coming up here because this product detects your hot word from anywhere in the room which would make my life so much easier for Voice control of Vera.

On top of that Amazon Prime users can sign up for an invite to get ECHO for $99 instead of $199. I already signed up and I am waiting for their invite. I will probably buy 2 of them and complement my Sonos speakers.

I would be curious to know if the video is near of what we can expect.

I would be worried too if this would be any other company or Kickstarter project but this is Amazon. 30 day return policy. If it doesn’t meet the advertised specs and functions it will go right back to them.

Wait and see. Hopping that it will be sold all over the world very soon.

Any idea how it could be possible to control Vera from the voice with the Amazon echo ?
It would require a mechanism to trigger an action in the Vera when someone says something to echo, passing the text to the called action. In this case, the echo should not handle internally the request. How could it decide that. Then in the Vera we should have complex code to analyze texts.
Not easy to implement.
Remember that the Amazon echo works in the Cloud.

What could be easier is to make the Echo say something from the Vera.

I put in my request. As a Prime member, the $99 works even as a novelty…

I was wondering about integration as well. This thing may just be the missing link in voice control.

With the release of Amazon Echo… I feel a disturbance in the force :slight_smile: … I think this may very well be a game changer.

Amazon Echo and Vera sure beats the heck out of Minimotes! LOL

“Dave, I’m afraid I can’t allow you to change the heating level…”

Actually with product it would be:

“Dave, I’m afraid I can’t allow you to change the heating level… level … level … level …”

If it was real AI and it had awareness of the platform on which it was running, it would be:

Dave, I’m afraid!

[quote=“RexBeckett, post:13, topic:183970”]If it was real AI and it had awareness of the platform on which it was running, it would be:

Dave, I’m afraid![/quote]

;D

Funny parody of the original Amazon video: Amazon Echo (Early Beta Version) - YouTube

HAL9000 version: Amazon Echo (The HAL9000 Beta Version) - YouTube

Since voice controlled home automation has been out there since this http://james.lipsit.com/home.htm

This guy saw a problem with something that plays music as it tries to listen for voice prompts via a microphone, Amazon must have solved this problem. That is why it always made more sense to me to have the voice control via your phone so you could talk directly into it without walking over to a device to talk into it. Apparently you don’t have to yell at Echo, but then again if the music is loud. Then there is the Big Brother issue of having an internet connected microphone monitoring you 24/7.

I think I still want one to try.

I entered the lottery to get an Echo. I figure for $99, why not and if it doesn’t have an open API, then back it goes. The real test will be if I have some audio turned up relatively high, can it even make sense of what I say

Maybe they have figured out the loud music thing, but it also says it comes with a remote with a mic in it for controlling playback. Also, I’m sure that the phone app will also give you some control over this. Granted, a truly hands free device would be better.

Perhaps some sort of noise cancelling circuitry for the microphone to cancel out the music so it can hear what’s going on in the room.

Being more realistic ;D than you guys, I think that it will really only handle speech during music, when it self is playing, not when you have your stereo on.

I assume any noise cancellation will only work when music is played through it, which makes perfect sense. If it knows what it is playing, it can ignore that and listen for the rest. Now, I’m not sure how easy that is to actually implement.