“asm-youtube-addon” a react component for getting youtube videos using voice commands

2 min readFeb 26, 2018

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A week ago, we have introduced our new project “Alya” in participation for Eclipse Open IoT Challenge, “Alya” is a modular personalized open-source smart mirror. In this blog, I am excited to talk about one of the core addons. A module to watch Youtube videos on “Alya”, our Youtube module is built on React and Electron. In the next sections, we will talk about the idea behind this module as well as a small demo to show how this module can be used.

Idea

There are many times when we want to watch Youtube videos while sitting in front of the mirror either for entertainment or some tutorials that teach you something while you get dressed like how to tie your tie. It is simple easy to use Alya to search, control and watch Youtube videos. All what you need to do is to spell the command and Alya will do the rest. The following demo shows how to use the module.

Demo

I will show an example of using the addon for showing a video for Barack Obama.

Commands

commands for showing the video :

“show me how to {…}”

“show me a video of {…}”

“show me a video about {…}”

“show a video of {…}”

“find a video of {…}”

“display a video of {…}”

commands for controlling the results of the video :

“go next”

“go previous”

“this one”

commands for controlling the video :

“stop the video”

“continue the video”

“close the video”

Usage

First you have to configure asm-youtube-addon-skill and follow the steps provided there.

Then you can use it as any react component .

Check details here asm-youtube-addon

The Design

Alya smart mirror : or any device integrated with Alexa.
AWS Lambda : it is an event-driven , server-less platform . It is for handling the requests from Alexa and forward them to AWS IoT.
AWS IoT : MQTT broker for forwarding the messages from lambda to our youtube Addon.