@Ellis, 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

https://synthiam.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.

Thanks for the quick reply. I am really interested in giving my robot the abilities that Alexa has. I thought it would be cool to use the tech that is already developed to accomplish this.

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.

If you developed a plugin, you would be able to use the Alexa voice I would assume. Another option is to use a voice from another vendor. There are some issues and I personally haven't tried to use some of these under windows 10.

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 am working on it now. Let you know when it is available.

This will be a very useful plugin

For obvious reasons I'd love to see this develop into a plug in? I ordered one to hack for ALAN. There is no audio port ( I know? How hard to have added a 3.5mm Jack?) so have to tear apart and add a couple wires to make it work. But can't stress enough how cool this would be.

I agree with everyone. It would be great to have the vast knowledge of the internet available by voice command to your robot.

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

@Ellis - Awesome research! I'll definitely look into the Alexa fund - nice find!