Making calls from your Echo

Two weeks ago, we rolled out something quietly and no one noticed… yet. And that’s the ability to make phone calls from your Echo.

This might be the next killer app for the Echo.

In March, we rolled out our first Alexa Skill called the Ubi Voice Prototyping Tool.

With it, you can create “lessons” for pretty much getting your Echo to do anything with our Ubi Portal site, portal.theubi.com.

These lessons let you map a phrase to the Echo (or any Alexa Voice Service-enabled hardware device) to anything.

Did you catch it?

That’s right, there’s a Twilio integration. This means we can create a rule to initiate a phone call.

With the rule above, if you say “Alexa, tell portal Call Mom” it will call two phone numbers. You can enter one for your mother and one for yourself. When you speak the command, both your phones will start to ring and you’ll be conferenced in! (It does require you to have a Twilio account, some credit, and an API key)

The same integration is available to anyone using our Lexa App.

Ahoy hoy away!