My friend Stephen and I have been talking about hacking the Amazon Echo so it can be a front end to our Sonos systems. Stephen decided to make it more than talk and downloaded some code on Github and stitched together a system that works. I was at his house yesterday evening and he showed it to me. Here’s a blurry video taken from a phone that shows it in action.
Stephen’s system uses the cloud based Skills interface to parse the commands, then sends instructions to some of that Github code running on Amazon’s Lamba cloud based code execution service, which then sends instructions to a local server on Stephen’s laptop that runs the code that controls the Sonos locally on his home network. It’s a kludge for sure, but it works and I am going to get this hack working on my Sonos system over the next few weeks.
But the whole experience got me thinking about hacking the Echo to do other things. The possibilities are endless.
Here’s an idea for some enterprising engineer out there. We own some bungalows in Venice that are rented out on Airbnb and VRBO. We have a Sonos Play in each of them. And we have a Google Doc that has frequently asked questions on it hanging in the kitchen of each bungalow. What if there was an app for Amazon Echo that could take in that Google Doc, parse the frequently asked questions and answers, and train Alexa (the voice command interface in Amazon Echo) to answer the frequently asked questions. That would get me to swap out the Sonos Plays in each bungalow for Amazon Echos. And Airbnb could promote that app to all of its hosts.
Anyway, there are all sorts of things that would be fun to make by hacking Echo. And I suspect they will. These voice based devices could be the next big platform for developers to make things on.
