Amazon Echo to HA Controllers

[deandob]

Dean, agree - their redirect vector based on "use, ask, tell" isn't so ideal as it makes the automation system seem like its secondary to the Echo itself. But it does work and the quality of the voice recognition from the Echo is excellent. Also worth noting in the 'skill' definition that you can have provide a voice response / acknowledgement for Echo as part of the command definition (eg. Bathroom light turned on).
 
Alexa has been an interesting experiment and will likely stay in my kitchen (especially if Amazon keep on improving the services / functionality as promised) and the kids like asking it questions / jokes and having the automation system attached adds to its versatility.

 

[ChrisCicc]

Say what you will about the Echo vs Kinect hardware, it's very clear how much more effective the Kinect SDK is in comparison. Microsoft "gets" developers... 
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYMH3qrHFEM

 

[deandob]

That I agree with. I see a bright future for Windows 10 IoT with speech recognition (Windows or cloud/Cortana) with the right analog audio front end or possibly a Kinect (I don't think Win IoT supports Kinect at this point). My problem with the Kinect is the form factor when used in somewhere like the kitchen. Being able to use Visual Studio and the power of most of the Windows SDK on something small like a Raspberry Pi is amazing....

 

[pete_c]

Yeah here see it that whole Kinect versus the Echo as an apples and oranges thing.  I have here hidden away the Echo where it is heard but not seen (WAF thing) and do not display it prominently.  That is me.  When we have visitors I just say it's another voice in the house as they are used to hearing voices when they visit anyways.
 
I was asked 'bout how am using the Kinect and where do I put it.  I still haven't implemented it's use yet.  The only time that I got in to the television computer games for a bit was in the early 1980's with the Atari 2600 / Magnovox Odessy stuff.  By the 1990's here did purchase that game stuff for my children and it was mostly them that played where I was just a participant when they played but had no personal interest.
 
I do personally believe that the Kinect has much more potential of doing more stuff than the Amazon Echo has today.  That said the Amazon Echo is being sold today and is doing stuff and selling like hotcakes right now. 
 
So guessing here Microsoft will learn what exactly folks like about the Amazon Echo (free R &D for them) and do it up a bit swaying those clients over to their side sometime in the future. 

 

[wkearney99]

Unfortunately Microsoft has a bad track record of introducing a lot of really cool ideas and then utterly dropping the ball on them.  I'd venture more than a few folks have looked at the Kinect, followed the news of the Primesense acquisition (by Apple) and decided to steer clear of the whole mess.   Stuff like the Skanect is/was interesting too.
 
Personally, there's a big difference between assistive 'ambient' computing and 3D/augmented reality.  Sure, there's a lot of room for overlap, and potentially at some point they'll be indistinguishable.  But lots of things worked quite successfully for decades because they worked effectively with the limited resources available.  Low end communications techniques like modems seem quaint today, but faxing continues to see regular use.  Security systems have been moving away from modems, typically in favor of cellular data.  My point is voice input is similarly cheap and able to utilize very little resources (power, bandwidth, etc).  That and user expectations are 'manageable' in that they understand voice as an input technique.  Start introducing cameras and a whole other set of issues start complicating the process.  Not that, at some point, they won't be used, but that much like modems, there's not necessarily a lot of need for them at this stage of the game.

 

[pete_c]

My point is voice input is similarly cheap and able to utilize very little resources (power, bandwidth, etc).  That and user expectations are 'manageable' in that they understand voice as an input technique.

 
Understood Bill.  I am not knocking the Amazon Echo but rather just stating what it is the Microsoft Kinect has the potential of doing.  Well too the OP is only really related to the Amazon Echo here anyways.
 
The good and bad track records can be or are similar today with many of the players in the realm of things.  The logistics / metrics of said efforts failed or successful are typically twittled (old meanng) to their audience anyways. 
 
Them bean counters can do magic with numbers whatever they are.
 
Yeah here relating to something else (ISP related) was I was gesturing at my monitors but not touching them while concurrently muttering (unintelligible)  and the computer didn't do anything in response. (and wife asking to whom was I talking to.)
 
With Alexa I can speak in a polite gentle voice and she would have soothed me in my time of need or grief or anger.
 
The ISP thing was me locking my email account and the ISP sending a reset to the locked email address.  Kind of funny in a way.  I did ask the tech who's great idea was that.

 

[ChrisCicc]

I do personally believe that the Kinect has much more potential of doing more stuff than the Amazon Echo has today.  That said the Amazon Echo is being sold today and is doing stuff and selling like hotcakes right now. 

 
Not only is the Kinect available now in its second generation, and not only was it for sale for nearly two years before the Echo, it is the fastest selling consumer electronics in history. Don't let the splashy press the Echo's been getting confuse the issue, it's still not close to the widespread deployment the Kinect has by an order of magnitude or two...
 

Unfortunately Microsoft has a bad track record of introducing a lot of really cool ideas and then utterly dropping the ball on them.  I'd venture more than a few folks have looked at the Kinect, followed the news of the Primesense acquisition (by Apple) and decided to steer clear of the whole mess.   Stuff like the Skanect is/was interesting too.

 
Primesense is irrelevant, both then and now. To a developer, there is a sensor. That's all we care about, the SDK calls are the same no matter the version/manufacturer of the sensor being used. The Microsoft SDK abstracts that all away from the developer. So the Primesense acquisition (which only came about because MS had already dropped them) literally makes no difference at all. Not to mention the reason their tech got dropped is because it's now a generation behind... 
 
All that said, I'm not picking one over the other, they both have their uses and I'm just pointing out the differences... 

 

[wkearney99]

Understood Bill.  I am not knocking the Amazon Echo but rather just stating what it is the Microsoft Kinect has the potential of doing.  Well too the OP is only really related to the Amazon Echo here anyways.
 
The good and bad track records can be or are similar today with many of the players in the realm of things.  The logistics / metrics of said efforts failed or successful are typically twittled (old meanng) to their audience anyways. 
 
Them bean counters can do magic with numbers whatever they are.
 
Yeah here relating to something else (ISP related) was I was gesturing at my monitors but not touching them while concurrently muttering (unintelligible)  and the computer didn't do anything in response. (and wife asking to whom was I talking to.)
 
With Alexa I can speak in a polite gentle voice and she would have soothed me in my time of need or grief or anger.
 
The ISP thing was me locking my email account and the ISP sending a reset to the locked email address.  Kind of funny in a way.  I did ask the tech who's great idea was that.

 
Nor am I favoring the Echo, or Amazon for that matter, over the Kinect.  The difference is there's fresh momentum and a lot of well-run infrastructure behind it vs the continued same-old-same-old of offerings from classic operating system vendors.  Time will tell, of course, but it's refreshing to see new development.

 

[ChrisCicc]

"Fastest selling"? If only because it came attached to a game console (by dictate/force), and has been almost universally ignored by all the developers that have driven the console's sales volume.  Whereas the Echo has sold purely for it's designed purpose.  So please, you're out of your depth making that shallow an argument. 

 
"According to a Guinness blog post, customers purchased 8 million Kinect units during the product's first 60 days on the market (from 4 November 2010 through 3 January 2011)--that's a rate of 133,333 units per day!"

And no, they did not ship with a console. People bought them on their own "purely for it's designed purpose" at $150 each. 
 

Handwaving about SDKs doesn't change the fact those are still beholden the bloated bureaucracy of the company behind it. How long before it's just one more re-org away from abandonment like so many other MS initiatives? Sure. you've got a vested interest, praying that doesn't happen. So too have many other developers, only to get left out in the cold when their OS vendor pivots away.

 
You mean, something like this? Wall Street Journal: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

 

[pete_c]

The difference is there's fresh momentum and a lot of well-run infrastructure behind it

 
Yes I like that.  Enthusiastic work hard play hard....always eases the stress.
 
Well just a couple of weeks or so ago though there was some press relating to the expected team efforts of answering of emails after midnight.   I know this doesn't relate to the Amazon Echo stuff going on.
 
I know the media / press can cut like a knife sometimes...wondering if this was all made up?
 
The Times story illustrates a cutthroat, utilitarian dystonia where employees gain favor for maiming others’ careers, weep openly at their desks, and are fired for illness or having families. An Orwellian system of data collection is used to rank all employees and evaluate them based on the company’s metric of “output” or “performance.” A secret feedback system encourages employees to rate their coworkers’ performance anonymously, often used for sabotage, according to the report. One of the more than 100 current or former employees the Times spoke to said that she was placed on a “danger of being fired” list for “difficulties in her personal life” after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
 
The Times’ investigation paints Amazon as a draconian, soulless company bent on profit and progress by any means necessary. Because of the piece’s high profile, it was quick to attract dissenters.
 
Amazon's chief executive officer Jeff Bezos responded to the article in a company e-mail late Sunday night saying that it “doesn’t describe the Amazon I know,” but, if these issues were true, that people should report concerns to Amazon’s Human Resources.

 

[Dean Roddey]

From a product standpoint, I'd certainly prefer the Kinect over the Echo. I supported the Echo because some folks were wanting it and it's not a lot of work to do. If I'd had the time to do the Kinect instead, I'm sure folks would have been happy to buy those, and it would be simpler for the user to set up, though a lot harder for me. The Echo is not simple for the end user to set up for secure usage with their automation system, because it requires going off LAN and coming back in, and so you have to set up security certificates on the home system to be safe about it.

 

[deandob]

Kinect in some respects is easier to integrate than Echo as it doesn't require as many bits (eg. AWS to host the skills) and as Chris points out in a Microsoft system the SDK makes integration relatively easy and more flexible than the Echo.
 
I haven't done voice integration with Kinect but I did get gesture recognition to work with the v1 SDK and my automation system in the home theater (open your arms to open curtains, close arms to close, raise arms up to increase volume, drop arms to decrease etc.). I can post the code to GitHub if anyone is interested to see how to do it - I used the same fuzzy logic algorithms (time domain warping) that I used for speech recognition in a Microchip system I have posted about in the DIY thread to recognise skeletal changes for the arms. Quite a fun project and worked somewhat well (would miss the occasional arm wave :mellow​.

 

[essmd]

"According to a Guinness blog post, customers purchased 8 million Kinect units during the product's first 60 days on the market (from 4 November 2010 through 3 January 2011)--that's a rate of 133,333 units per day!"

And no, they did not ship with a console. People bought them on their own "purely for it's designed purpose" at $150 each. 
 
 
 
You mean, something like this? Wall Street Journal: Amazon Curtails Development of Consumer Devices

 
 
Chris,
 
So I have an Elk M! Gold controlling UPB switches for lights and pool control, Carrier Infinity system with 7 zones but currently no SAM module, two Chamberlain "dumb" garage door openers, and 2 z-wave Schlage deadbolts currently not connected to anything used manually.  I just received an Echo for evaluation and exploration when I came across this chain.
 
I am intrigued by your comments.
 
Somewhat handy but no programmer, I self-installed Cat5 everywhere, installed and programmed my own Elk including rules,  and have a single WiFi router that covers the whole house.
 
How can Castle OS work for me and what will I need to purchase to connect all of my stuff?  
 
Thanks

 

[feobrien]

 
I use the Echo for basic control of my Russound/Sonos system (turn on Russound zones, select and play Pandora stations on Sonos, etc.).  We don't typically blast music through my whole house audio - it's just for casual listening.  I have no problem getting the Echo to hear me over it or anything else of normal volume (TV, etc.).  If I'm having a party with lots of people talking loudly it's sometimes a challenge if I'm not close to the Echo but usually works fine.
 
 
I have been looking around, how are yiu able to control your Russound with your echo?
Thanks
 
 
Did you get one at the $129 Prime Day deal?  I was almost tempted to get a 3rd Echo at that price but I restrained myself.[/quote]

 

[DeLicious]

No, he's right; something like the Echo needs to be a drop-in. 
 
Take the Hue bridge, for example - it has native support for any number of mobile apps, full web support, can be easily integrated into third party HA platforms, has an IFTTT channel, bulbs can be controlled locally, and is supported by Echo.  Anytime a change is made to one of my bulbs, every other device that connects will know it.  So who cares where the change is made - I can use a Hue Tap, use the iConnectHue iOS app, use a CQC event, yell at Alexa, use the Philips iPad app, or the Harmony Hub, or test out openH@B without interruption, etc ...
 
But, without the Hue bridge acting as the universal translator for all of the rest, none of the above is really possible.  So I think this is what he is after - if the Echo (or other devices) could natively throw out universally accepted commands like HTTP triggers, then the device itself becomes portable and wholly compatible with any platform that accepts incoming HTTP triggers.

 
 

In my humble but accurate opinion, from a user perspective the endpoint for a voice recognition scheme such as the Echo should be an alternative form of manual execution of home automation tasks with far-field mics that are always on.  Any further than that is dangerous from a transferability perspective. It must have the ability to call any home automation system.
 
The reason I say that is for abstraction purposes. You're not locked into the Amazon system, nor required to purchase a device from a single manufacturer (Kinect or Amazon).  You can execute tasks that run in whatever home automation system you have, be it software based (CQC, HomeSeer, Premise, Girder, Elve, other) or hardware based (C4, AMX, Crestron, Cortexa, ...).
 
That would require either a hw or sw based controller/designer of the Echo, or perhaps a built in web server with the configuration stuff built into the unit.
 
Now will that happen? No I doubt it, no reason for a far-field VR hardware manufacturer to do that. But it would be nice.

 
So, I've been reading this thread again and stumbled across these replies to my original question of what y'all wished the Echo would do.
 
As it turns out, I think you have your wish granted with the SmartHome API (which I don't think existed at the time that you made these replies). With the SmartHome API, you should be able to write a Lambda in AWS to talk to whatever endpoint you want.  The only limitation is that you would have to model your device as an on/off device, a dimmer, or a thermostat, as that is all the SmartHome API supports at this time.  
 
For example, say you have an RPi that controls your garage door opener, and you have a webserver on it that acts as a RESTful endpoint.  You can write your Lambda in AWS to, when you say Discover my Devices, recognize the RPi connection with the turnOn intent.  Then when you say "turn on my garage door opener", it hits your lambda with a turn on intent, which your code recognizes, and you can forward that in any way to the endpoint of your choice. 
 
This doesn't even have to be a published skill for all the world to see. It can simply be a private skill that you write in your AWS account that would automatically be linked with your Alexa.
 
Please let me know if you think I'm wrong in this regard, or if you think there is still something missing from the support that I'm not understanding.