Welcome Alexa, your personal assistant

Room 5

What if you’re eating and having a discussion about a certain topic? Searching on your phone would mean your food gets cold. Or what if you’re lying on the couch without your phone and you want to control the lights? Smartphones are so 2015, they were ok, but they had their best time.

Welcome Alexa, your new personal assistant. Alexa is a voice service, it will respond to your questions and execute tasks. You can for instance ask Alexa for the weather, or ask her to play a certain radio station.

In this presentation I will show you how to create your own Alexa device. The setup uses a Raspberry Pi, microphone, speaker and a Java application. I will compare the custom setup with the Echo device Amazon is selling. Next to that I will show you how to integrate Alexa in your home automation setup for instance with openHAB. That way you can control your lights and everything else with your voice. Last but not least I will show you how to create your own skills in Java to add functionality to Alexa. A demo with a custom Skill deployed with Maven and running serverless in AWS Lambda is included as well.