@Andy. There was a discussion here a last week about hacking it. They were saying it could be accesses through the button on the top. I think it was Dave Cohren was giving some advice on how it could be done.

When you get some time could you post the youtube links that show how to change the voice? I looked but can't find. Thanks!

I know about the button but I am looking for for functions. I am curious about any new hacks. I am anxious to see the echo dot used more with the EZ-B.

Give a little time to find the video again. I had been looking in a lot of places, and cleaned out my you tube history.

Ron

Hi Dave,

This may help :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2Ya3Lf5XSk
Amazon Echo + IBM Watson = Alex Watson (Bruce Winter)

I think there is another one. I will continue to look. Let me know how you make out.

Ron

Thanks Andy. This is great.

I am curious if the software guys here, are looking into or have found a way to get Alexa"s voice or get her to read the text to speech from the EZ-B. (I know,,, it isn't a simple thing, but?)

I would like to have a constant voice using the Echo Dot and my EZ-B.

I posted the link using IBM Watson, but I have NO idea what Bruce Winter is talking about.

Any thoughts?

Ron

I am also looking to do this very thing. I hope someone has an easy solution.

Hi @ Ellis,

At the present time, my assistant Antonn has many built in abilities from his original programming. Alexa has allowed some additions to be made. It is kind if fun to ask Antonn to do something and have him ask Alexa to do it instead. ( turn on added smart lights and appliances). A fun problem is when I ask him to play some music I want to hear, and he chooses what he wants, not what I want..

I continue to look for ways to change Alexa's voice or get a copy of her voice which will be able to run off of the ARC text to speech.

Ron

I use Alexa with my female robot "Lal", and it sounds somewhat similar to her voice. My Elvis hack robot "Elvia" really needs a male voice! I have sent feedback requests to Amazon several times requesting a male voice. -E-mail sent to Amazon today- Is there any time frame for the Josh AI skill? See link below. I am just looking for an option for a male voice. Thank You Steve

Amazon Customer Service Response 3:45 PM Hello, I understand that you would like to change the device voice to male voice. I've checked the information and would like to inform you that currently there is no such option available to make it work without voice. I certainly apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. I will consider your query as a feedback. I wish I could make this feature available for you now, I do understand how convenient it would be for all our customers if this feature become available. Please know that our developers will work on it and try to make such features available as soon as possible on our website. I've shared your feedback to our concern department. I'm sorry that I'm not able to promise you a time line by when would this feature be available as it totally depends upon the app developers. Please understand that as this is a new device and I can understand that it doesn't have all features but we're getting feature requests from many customers and we're forwarding them to development team to looked into then and to implement them if possible. As with all of our products, we continue to make Alexa better for customers with regular software updates. As soon as this feature become available, we will definitely let you know about this through our website. If you have any query or would like to give more feedbacks/suggestions, please feel free to write us back. You can give us feedback through e-mail and more ways are available here. By email: alexa-support@amazon.com You can also submit feedback about Alexa using the Amazon Alexa app: To submit feedback, open the left navigation panel in the Alexa app, and then select "Help & Feedback" > "Send Feedback." Our Alexa team will review your feedback so that we can improve your experience with Alexa. In addition to our large selection, one of the benefits we try very hard to offer our customers is convenience. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience you experienced in this case. We look forward to assist you. We'd appreciate your feedback. Please use the links below to tell us about your experience today. Best regards, Did I solve your problem? Yes No Your feedback is helping us build Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company. Thank you. Amazon.com

Josh AI

Hi Steve! Hope all is well and you're doing good. Thought I'd post this vid about Josh:

@ Steve S,

Thanks for the post with the info. I will also contact them. maybe if enough of us make the request for the voice change they may set it higher on their list.

Hi Dave, Thanks for the info on Josh AI. It is also a way to go. I am going to try using some of the features Alexa has to see if I can get conversational responses.

I am working on my Alexa project and hope to post the pictures then a video in the next few days.

Ron

Hi, I was just looking at reviews and saw that it cost 10,000 for Joah.ai . Maybe this was an old page but I think 10,000 dollars is a little expensive. The system seems to work well. Let me know if the cost has changed and is it available now.

Ellis

Just a quick update. I took apart my test unit (AGAIN) and added jaw movement. My goal is to get this working with my EZ-B which will control the eyes and neck. I used a scary terry board to drive the jaw from the Dot. I will try to also input from the EZB to the scary terry board have the jaw move with the canned script text to speech.

Ron

Dave, Doing ok, thank you. Enjoyed B9 arm videos. Ron, Thank you for sharing your project with Alexa, and starting this thread. Here is another option, a Sabrent USB audio card allows Alexa input directly into ARC. The input moves two mouth servos on my robot using Sound servo PC Speaker. The output can be sent to an amplified speaker, because my robot is noisy. Simple text Say("") commands also work with this setup, because all audio triggers the Sound servo PC Speaker. The Sabrent USB audio input becomes your microphone, so I must remove it to use my default laptop microphone for VR. I will try to do a video update soon. It would be great to have some custom Alexa responses for our robots. Steve S

Hi Steve, Elvia is quite the lady ! I really like the skin movement reality.

I messed with IFTTT to see what can be done to trigger the Echo Dot. The trigger is no problem, there doesn't seem to be any text to speech (Alexa Voice, which I am sure is locked (copyright?) at this time or an optional voice) available (YET). I hope it gets developed. Once developed and opened up we will have the whole thing.

Meanwhile my Antonn project asks "Alexa".

Ron

Ron, Here is something Amazon is changing right now. NEW WAKE WORD

ADDED, Computer, Engage !

Thanks

A question for Echo owners ( I don't have one yet): when Alexa speaks, does she use the same speaker that provides the sound for streamed music, or does she have a separate speech output/speaker? I have an (inelegant) idea for voice modification, but if the sound output is common to speech and other sounds, it won't work.

Thanks!

Same speaker for everything in the echo dot. Ive been experimenting with live voice changers that change pitch and gender. But run into the issue you are bringing up , if you want to play music, be prepared for some interesting results :/

..and all your robots will be named Echo, Alexa or Amazon...

They just added "Computer" as a name. :)

Using a voice modifier was what I was going to try, so there goes that idea out the window. Unless there's a filter switch that could turn the modifier on or off when the voice engages.

In my best Scotty voice , " computer on..."

LOL! That reminds me........... :P

One of my favorite scenes from ST IV. :D

Has anyone done more with Alexa ? I continue to transfer commands from my robot to Alexa for weather, music, radio, news, setting timers or alarms but that is it.

API.AI can call Alexa skills. There is an API.AI plugin already built.

@CochranRobotics could not agree more on this! :)

I am hoping for more features to hack. The phone features may become interesting. A futuristic "video phone call' generated by a robot might be cool? I have to see where it goes first. (It could be cool to have a robot as an "answering machine"). ( Using vision to recognizes who is calling or answering ?)

I'm just stirring the pot. Maybe someone will get some other ideas. I hope others in the community will post their uses interacting with their robots.

@CochranRobotics I did not know the api.ai could call Alexa Skills.

I thought you misstated that until I looked and under integration on the api.ai website it sure enough does have that option built in! LOL :D

There are so many fantastic software options now, it's like an embarrassment of riches!

It also interfaces with Google Home and with Google Assistant. I haven't looked into that, but with Google now owning them, it would be logical.

Also, if memory serves me right, it has an IFTTT channel but I could be wrong. I am trying to remember how we did some of the things what we did with EZ-AI. Memory gets fuzzy when you aren't actively working on something anymore. I believe that we were using IFTTT to then control the OpenHAB instance but I can't remember.

So, here is the chain... You can record text from MS Speech stuff, and then send it to API.AI which then can act as a brain and determine what to do with what was said. From there it can return text to be spoken, call an echo skill (like say [what ever was returned from API.AI]) and a lot more. The issue is that a robot would only have the alexa voice. If API.AI decided that it needed to do something like "Turn on my living room light" it would use IFTTT to then transfer the request to OpenHAB which would be able to complete the request and so on.

It is a pretty powerful addition to ARC for sure. I just need to get back to it again as things change quickly as is evident by the new features in ARC. This rapid change is ultimately what caused me to bow out of EZ-AI due to it needing to be a full time job to keep up with the changes that are happening in this arena. I wish I was wealthy for no other reason than to be able to focus on one thing instead of many.

One other thing... OpenHAB2 is out now. It is much easier to use than base OpenHAB.

Okay, one more thing... API.AI has conversational logic built in, so something like...

"Turn off the living room light and lock the doors" would work.
Then, "turn it back on" - would be recognized as "Turn the living room light back on" and would work.

The conversational logic is a really cool piece of this. Also, something like Who wrote "To Kill a Mockingbird?" and then "What year was she born?" and then "What happened that year?" and then "What other books did she write?"

would all work.

Thanks David. I didn't realize the power in API.AI . I have to do homework and get it going.

Another thing to load into Antonn. It sounds like this will be the main AI driver I will need for him.

Yeah guys I could not agree more on the subject...api.ai is the key to bring natural language to your robot! It is a very powerful tool!

As @CochranRobotics pointed out, you will send text to api.ai where it gets processed and returned to ARC. This can be done easy by using the powerful plugin that @DJSures provided! Along with the speech there is also the action variable returned to ARC...this variable can be used to build logic or trigger events within ARC!

If you would like to call IFTTT you could use the new ARC IFTTT plugin. A certain returned action variable would trigger a certain IFTTT call! If you would want the robot to perform a certain move you could trigger AutoPosition...different action variables could trigger different robot animations. There is a lot of ways to get stuff done, and integration is very easy!

If you are using ARC you can also obviously change your TTS voice in Windows, if you are using the Google Assistant they already provided Google AIY where you can hack into Actions on Google to give your robot a specific voice! I don't know about Alexa skills, but I guess it is well integrated too!

Let's put some peronality to your beloved little toys! :D

Andy Roid

2017 video

how did you add the jaw movement on Antonn to speak the Alexa response?

I use a Scary Terry board and set up 2 inputs to allow it to move the jaw.

I use the talk servo on ARC, it works well,

but it to connect to Alexa -- ??

on the back of my echo Alexa there is a:

3.5 mm audio input or output Configure in the Alexa app

can you give me a screen shot?

are you still there?

@EzAng  the audio jack on alexa is output just get a 3.5mm phono plug double ended, plug one end into alexa the other end to a Scary Terry board and that is it, but you will have the alexa voice, I tried as per instructions but was unable to get Alexa to use a male voice.  I added a phone jack to Google not an easy job but google is easy to add a male voice, I find google better anyway as you don't have to keep using hay google if you keep talking it stays on. I am still working on how to change the wakeup command to the robots name instead of hay google. lots to do so little time.