The Amazon Echo has been a big success for its decent music experience and most importantly the Alexa voice interaction service. People who loves music as well as enjoy controlling smart devices with their voices would definitely want one. But the truth is, many of us already have a speaker for music playing, and the only problem is that, it is not as smart as Echo.

The ReSpeaker from Seeed Studio was just launched on Kickstarter in August. It is a hardware module that uses existing voice recognition services like Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service, the Google Speech API, the Microsoft Cognitive Service, and Houndify to allow voice interaction with anything you want. The ReSpeaker also comes with a far-field voice capture microphone array which means it is able to hear you as well as expensive hardware like the Echo.

This article will show you how to DIY your own Amazon Echo with ReSpeaker and any speaker you have by hand. Check out how it works on the video:

 

 

Prepare:

• 1x ReSpeaker Core
• 1x Mic Array
• 1x SD Card
• 1x Aux Cable
• 1x Any Ordinary Speaker with AUX port
• 1x Power Source

Skill Required:

Familiarity with putty

 

STEP 1:

Register Amazon Developer Account and Add Alexa Voice Service to ReSpeaker

To use Alexa Voice Service ReSpeaker, firstly you need an Amazon Developer Account and register a device to start enabling Alexa on ReSpeaker. Go with the ‘Get Started’ for Alexa Voice Service. Make sure your Alexa for ReSpeaker have a proper Device Type ID which we would use it for Alexa Service log in.

 

Step 2: Download the Code on Github to SD Card

ReSpeaker has very limited on-board flash storage (about 5M). You can download everything you need from Github to your SD Card.

 

Step 3: Fill in Alexa Device Information

In the file ‘Alexa’ you just downloaded and you can find a python script named example_creds.py. Rename example_creds.py to creds.py and fill ProductID, Security_Profile_Description, Security_Profile_ID, Client_ID and Client_Secret with your Alexa device information. You can find all these information on the device information you just registered for you Amazon Developer Account.

 

Step 4:  Download Required Libraries

Run setup_on_openwrt.sh with putty(Download here) get required python libraries. The script will download the ReSpeaker python library, the Request library and the CherryPy library. It might take you few minutes, depends on your network speed.

 

Step 5:  Get Authorization from Amazon

 

Then run python auth_web.py. Now you can connect your PC or any smart phone to ReSpeaker’s Access Point (AP). Before you open http://192.168.100.1:3000 on your browser, make sure you see ‘ENGINE Bus STARTED’ on your putty, it will redirect you to Amazon to sign in.

 

Step 6: Running Alexa on ReSpeaker

Now you can run python alexa.py and start interacting with Alexa.

 

Step 7:  Turn Your Speaker into Amazon Echo

With all things set up, you can now simply connect ReSpeaker with any speaker you have by hand, to turn it into an Amazon Echo.

 

ReSpeaker is live on Kickstarter,  back us now!

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