Amazon Echo turned out to be a successful product for the company so much so that Amazon has now come out with an entire lineup of Echo products. It’s not stopping there, though, as it looks to expand its Alexa digital personal assistant as far as possible. An Amazon employee has put together a detailed step-by-step guide which you and I can use to build our very own Echo speaker with Raspberry Pi. Yes, it’s going to have Alexa.
The instructions might appear to be very difficult or easy to follow depending upon your experience with these things. To make your own Alexa-powered Echo smart speaker you’ll need the Raspberry Pi model 2 computer which costs $40, several inexpensive components and a USB microphone.
Amit Jotwani, senior evangelist for Alexa at Amazon, put together this detailed step-by-step guide and put it up on GitHub. Jotwani is tasked with helping developers and now tinkerers with building Alexa into their own products.
Keep in mind that some coding experience is also required to make this work, you don’t have to be a pro at it, but a minor skill level is definitely required. The only caveat with your own Alexa-powered speaker as opposed to the products that Amazon is selling is that you can’t wake it up with a keyword like Alexa. You will need to press a button to wake it up before you issue your commands.
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