Voice Controlled Smart Home

The Internet of Voice has come and now you can monitor and control all various devices in your home by using the sound of your voice, Amazing!!! Amazon Alexa and Raspberry Pi made the thing supper easy and now every hobbyist can enter in the era of hands-free home control using Alexa Voice Service.

Getting started with a voice controlled smart home is easier than you might think, and it won’t cost you much money either. You just need a Raspberry Pi with Alexa Voice Service.

In this project I will give you complete instruction to convert the dream to reality. I made the project to control 4 appliances and I used a Raspberry Pi to do this. Single Raspberry Pi is used for dual purpose. I is serving as a Alexa Voice Client and Paho MQTT client at the same time. You may use Amazon ECHO device for Alexa Voice Service. If you do so then you can escape first two steps (STEP 1 & STEP 2). For voice interface you require Alexa custom voice skill. Don't worried, making Alexa custom voice skill is very easy.

I developed a custom voice skill for my project and the skill was published and now live in the link below.

http://alexa.amazon.com/spa/index.html#skills/dp/B01KLHL8JS/?ref=skill_dsk_skb_ca_4

I hope you already watched demo video of my project. If you like it let's start making it.

For easy understanding I divided full project documentation into several steps. Follow step by step, I think you will enjoy it. If you have Amazon Echo device and want to use that ignore first two steps.

Amazon Developer Account Setup

If you are not already enrolled, setup an Amazon Developer Account which will allow the development of Alexa Voice Service and many more. Follow the link: https://developer.amazon.com/home.html

STEP 1.

Setup Alexa Voice Service

1. Log in to Amazon Developer Console and get started with Alexa Voice Service.

Turn your Raspberry Pi into Alexa Client

Full instructions to make your Pi into an Alexa Client is available in AVS official Github page (https://github.com/amzn/alexa-avs-raspberry-pi) but I found it more easy to Sam Machin Github page (https://github.com/sammachin/AlexaPi).

1. Clone the repo to your Pi using the terminal. Type:

sudo git clone https://github.com/sammachin/AlexaPi.git

2. Go to AlexaPi directory and Run the setup script

./setup.sh

3. Wait for a while to ask your security profile information. Enter all information (product ID, Security profile ID, Client ID etc.) from the security profile of AVS when ask.