Tesla’s cars have a variety of cool features that you’re unlikely to find on most cars, I can’t recall if there’s any other company that’s making a car with an air filtration system that’s capable of holding up against biological warfare. Tesla’s cars also have a Summon feature which enables the car to exit the garage on its own, and while owners have been able to use this feature through their key fob for six months now, someone actually went ahead and taught Amazon’s Alexa digital personal assistant to summon the Tesla Model S.
Jason Goecke used an unofficial Tesla API and the Amazon Echo, he wrote code that runs in the cloud and responds to keyword triggers that it has been taught, which in this case is “Ask KITT,” because there’s nothing quite like a Knight Rider reference.
We can see in the video that this setup works as if it has always been possible to do this, even though Tesla and Amazon Alexa don’t play nice with each other officially, this goes to show that it’s not that hard to make it happen.
Goecke says that this was a fun weekend project and he’s calling on Tesla to open up its developer tools so that there’s a “fully supported and safe public API” so that developers have the opportunity to build apps that “even Elon Musk hasn’t dreamed of (yet).”