Cloud voice recognition “Alexa” for “alya-smart-mirror”

2 min readMar 14, 2018

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Few days ago we introduced the Offline voice recognition of alya-smart-mirror(ASM). Today, few hours before eclipse open IoT challenge 4.0 submission deadline, we will introduce another voice recognition solution for alya-smart-mirror. Alya can be integrated with Alexa using all the great built in capabilities of Alexa.

Why Alexa?

Alexa has a set of great built in commands as well as its openness and flexibility to build customized skills. Above that, Alexa is known of its openness and cross-platform characteristic and can be integrated with the Raspberry Pi, Linux, Mac or Windows and thats why we chose it.

Usage

Alya will have all the great build in capabilities of Alexa in alarm and timing, Calendar, entertainment and food, holidays, language, and other different fields.

examples :

Alexa, sing for me.
Alexa, give me a joke.
Alexa, open lizard spock.
Alexa, how many people live in ‘place’?
Alexa, what was the score of the ‘team’ game?
Alexa, will I need an umbrella today?

…

And it has many and many other awesome built in commands. Here is the full list of commands.

Installation

Integrating Alya with Alexa is done simply by integrating the AVS on the Raspberry Pi using a Node.js server, and a third-party wake word engine. The exact steps are provided and explained by Amazon in a step-by-step guide instructions in this blog alexa-avs-raspberry-pi.

Further Development

Alexa is providing the users with a wide range of new skills, with huge help of their development system, to be added to their Alexa like custom skills or Alexa Iftt. Custom skills are totally created and designed by you using A set of intents that represent actions that users can do with your skill. With the help of the custom skills a wide range of Addons can be added to Alya, an example of that is the youtube voice search engine “asm-youtube-addon”.

Wake Word

So, in Alya the wake word is different, and guess what ? it is also Alya! which change the commands to :

Alya, sing for me.
Alya, give me a joke.

…

If you decided to change the name, it can be simply changed to any name from your choice, using Snowboy, by two steps:

Create your personal hotword model through their website or hotword API.
Replace the hotword model in Alexa AVS sample app (after installation) with your personal model.

For more details check Snowboy-Alexa-support.