Ellis
USA
Asked
— Edited
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 ARC uses the Windows Speech APIs to support two different functionalities:
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.
Alexa Voice Service supports speech recognition requests, you capture the voice request and you upload to their service.
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.
Alexa Skills is a different beast, provides a mechanism to create skills/action responses applied to the speech recognition/interpretation.
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.
Amazon Echo is a consumer hardware product which uses all the above APIs, and the main objective is to materialize the concept.
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.
So far i got some success with the Alexa Voice Service, there are some gaps, for example i need to start and stop the voice recording, to be smooth it's necessary some trigger like "Alexa, ..." one idea is to use the local speech recognition engine, to start the recording until there's a silence (sound processing) or a timeout.
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
:) You are traveling the same path that EZ-AI traveled.
BTW, one of the services that we use allows you to tie into Alexa.
I presume in your ez-ai the "interesting part" will be connecting all the dots, skills routing with yours or other providers, content feeding, there s a lot of work to be done to integrate and unify all the tools.
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.
Something to keep and eye on and who doesn't like Open Source!
hackaday.com/2015/09/23/echo-meet-mycroft/
Don't mean to hi jack this tread.