
Ellis
I have purchased an Amazon Echo and am very impressed with its abilities. I would like to know if there is any way to merge my Echo with EZB so I can get the benefit of both systems through my Echo. This sounds confusing but I want the benefit of information and voice interaction of my Echo and the Robot control aspects of EZB by using my Echo's great voice recognition. I love the Echo speaker system and microphone and its ability to answer almost any question. I also want to use the Echo for voice commands to the EZB and I want to use the Echo voice for both.
I realize I may have to use Windows Cortana since the voice comes through Windows but I like Echo Better and it has the ability to connect and control items through IFTTT.
The Amazon Echo is a really cool device and I think Amazon got it right for almost everything. There are a couple of things that they should have added to make it perfect in my opinion and I hope that this is just the first of their products in this line.
I wish it had a camera. With a camera, the use of multiple users becomes amazing for this product. You can have multiple users, but the echo doesn't automatically switch between these users based on some non-obstructive mechanism. Hopefully they will find a way to automatically switch between users.
There isn't an easy way to have multiple of these devices work in conjunction with each other to make a whole house solution that shares data between these devices. I wish that there was.
Anyway, to your question. The Amazon Echo uses Alexa for its intelligence. Alexa is a service provided by Amazon which allows you to interface to this intelligence. The Amazon Echo is just a client for Alexa. So, the real thing that you want to do is to have a plugin developed to use the Alexa service. This is possible at a cost.
I wouldn't say it is easy, but if you would like to do some research, here are some sites that you should visit.
https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa
https://developer.amazon.com/appsandservices
http://www.ez-robot.com/Tutorials/UserTutorials/146/1
This would give you the beginning points of developing a plugin for ARC that uses the services provided by Amazon.
The main way you would know the difference between Alexa and my robot would be the voice difference. Since EZB uses windows voice, if I could find an Alexa' voice for windows it would help.
A single voice is important to me, so with my projects, I normally just return the text of the statement and then put it into a variable in ARC, which then has a script to say the text. As you say, this then uses the selected voice from windows or a third party that has been loaded into windows.
I have done some research and found that Alexa has a Alexa Skills Kit (ASK).
https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit
This is a free SDK that lets you easily add new Alexa voice capabilities to your robot or any other device you want to make. In other words it gives you the capability of creating code to interface anything you build to Alexa. It is free and the usage is free. You do not have to buy an Alexa to develop this capability into your creation.
You do this by using Alexa Voice Service (AVS)
https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-voice-service
AVS allows simple code to work with Alexa.
Also this might be interesting to DJ. Amazon has set aside 100 million dollars to help manufactures develop this into their products. It seems like you would qualify as a manufacture to use some of this money to add this capability to your products. It might be a way of getting some development money.
You can find this which is called The Alexa Fund and can be found at this link.
https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-fund
Don't lose your time, when the questions are done, says thank you and that's it, no email asked, it's a scam.
The post should be deleted!
I have come up with a way to almost accomplish what I am wanting to do. I think if I put my Echo on my robot and Bluetooth my computer to it. All audio will come out of the echo speaker. You will also be able to ask my computer questions and Echo will answer. Does this make sense?
Alan
Alan
How did you incorporate this into your robot, how did you get it to work?
I have it on my Amazon TVFirestick, plugs into a HDMI port on my TV.
Had audio playing from it, thru a bluetooth speaker on my robot, paired with the Firestick.
It worked well for a while, till I tried operating the robot at the same time.
I think the WiFi and bluetooth had interference, the Firestick gave me a warning that it may cause issues unless I change to a different router type. The Firestick eventually slowed and locked up.
The best solution may be having a plugin, but I am not talented to create one.
I have thought about getting a small HDMI monitor or a HDMI audio breakout board?
Alan
Steve G did a good tutorial on the process based on our (mostly his) work figuring it out. http://www.ez-robot.com/Tutorials/UserTutorials/32/1
Alan
1) Text-To-Speech (Say commands)
2) Speech Recognition (Trigger scripts per pre-configured phrases)
Microsoft provides additional voices files per feature TTS/SR, Culture (US,UK,CA,etc) and gender.
I've installed US,UK,CA,IN accents, also you can buy commercial voices (there are some posts) although i don't know if the commercial voices are used only for TTS or both.
Because the recognition process is not done in the desktop, it's necessary to implement a mechanism to start audio capture and some timeout/trigger to stop.
Once you have the recorded audio, you call their api and a sound result is returned, you can output the result in your desktop speakers or in the EZB speaker (via EZB SDK).
To summarize Amazon Alexa Voice Service, allows you to do Speech Recognition, request interpretation and return results.
ASFAIK does not provide a TTS functionality.
Examples:
Alexa make an appointment with ...
Alexa switch off the A/C
Alexa goto my bedroom (home robot)
are parsed and routed to different applications.
Based in some reviews it seems the microphone array is very good.
I believe once the Amazon APIs take off to other devices/solutions Echo will be off the shelf, you will have the Alexa functionalities in the TV, smartphones, other hardware devices, robots, appliances etc.
Alexa Skills requires a callback mechanism, which is not simple to have on a mobile desktop or tablet, there are other alternatives to solve the issue, but is the one needed to trigger the custom actions.
Cheers
BTW, one of the services that we use allows you to tie into Alexa.
So far i m only in the easy path: integration started as an iot curiosity.
i think for simple robots windows speech apis are more aligned, All the logic/processing is local (desktop), only for entertaining, a quick (poor man's) AI or other alexa providers, makes sense going out.
hackaday.com/2015/09/23/echo-meet-mycroft/
Don't mean to hi jack this tread.
We don't use either of these two. We use others that provide more information than either and have the data approved by professionals in those specific fields. A chemist reviews the chemical knowledge, physicist the physics knowledge and so on. We also have a local database for reminders and such.
when you mention same path, i assumed EZ-AI would be an AI hub handle multiple sources like Alexa, Cortana, Google now, etc.
So my last comment does not reflect the real EZ-AI direction, I apologize if I mislead anyone.
API.AI
Nuance Cloud
Wolfram|Alpha
Some local stuff that we have written
We have dropped Watson as these other services do a better job and cost less for the user.
API.AI can connect to Cortana and Alexa and allows you to customize EZ-AI if you want to go down that path.
Same path referring to how to handle the initial "Hey robotname" to start recording and when to stop, then submit the recorded data to other services.
Nice
it resembles me my bedroom alarm clock, my model must be version 0.1, mine have advanced features FM/AM radio, if i add a RPI2, it will be a killer product!
Here you go.
https://alexaweb.herokuapp.com/
That's great!
Just played with it and it seems to work very well.
IFTTT already supports a few Alexa commands. I use the Amazon Alexa Channel to create a verbal trigger
Then I use the Maker Channel as described in another thread to send the command to EZB.
Execute Scripts Or Commands With Http Get Commands