Alexa Skills Projects

Build exciting projects with Amazon Alexa and integrate it with Internet of Things

Madhur Bhargava

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788997584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Hardware
• Index: Computer Science

Get up and running with the fundamentals of Amazon Alexa and build exciting IoT projectsAbout This Book• Gain hands-on experience of working with Amazon Echo and Alexa• Build exciting IoT projects using Amazon Echo• Learn about voice-enabled smart devicesWho This Book Is ForAlexa Skills Projects is for individuals who want to have a deep understanding of the underlying technology that drives Amazon Echo and Alexa, and how it can be integrated with the Internet of Things to develop hands-on projects.What You Will Learn• Understand how Amazon Echo is already being used in various domains• Discover how an Alexa Skill is architected• Get a clear understanding of how some of the most popular Alexa Skills work• Design Alexa Skills for specific purposes and interact with Amazon Echo to execute them• Gain experience of programming for Amazon Echo• Explore future applications of Amazon Echo and other voice-activated devicesIn DetailAmazon Echo is a smart speaker developed by Amazon, which connects to Amazon's Alexa Voice Service and is entirely controlled by voice commands. Amazon Echo is currently being used for a variety of purposes such as home automation, asking generic queries, and even ordering a cab or pizza.Alexa Skills Projects starts with a basic introduction to Amazon Alexa and Echo. You will then deep dive into Alexa Programming concepts such as Intents, Slots, Lambdas and maintaining your skill's state using DynamoDB. You will get a clear understanding of how some of the most popular Alexa Skills work, and gain experience of working with real-world Amazon Echo applications. In the concluding chapters, you will explore the future of voice-enabled applications and their coverage with respect to the Internet of Things.By the end of the book, you will have learned to design Alexa Skills for specific purposes and interact with Amazon Echo to execute these skills.Style and approachA practical guide filled with real world examples that will help you understand the process of creating Alexa Skills from scratch and it's real world applications.

Home Automation with Alexa

"Communication must be HOT. That's Honest, Open, and Two-Way."

– Dan Oswald

As we progress through this book, the skills we create are evolving too. We started with a simple Hello World Skill and went on to create an SMS sender, a trivia game, a skill that talks about cryptocurrencies, and in this chapter, we will be working on Ambience Manager, which can tell us the ambience parameters, such as the temperature and humidity, of our homes.

We will be designing this skill by covering the following topics:

• Introduction to Home Automation and Ambient Sensors
• Designing the Ambience Manager Skill
• Developing the Mobile App
• Developing the Ambience Manager Skill

This chapter will be covering a lot of ground since our Ambience Manager Skill will be communicating with an ambient sensor, hence it will also involve the details regarding the ambient sensor as well as a mobile app, which will help us in uploading the temperature data to the cloud.

Introduction to Home Automation and Ambient Sensors

For introductory purposes, home automation is a concept whereby a user can control standard home fixtures such as lights, music systems, televisions, and even climate, using an array of intelligent sensors rather than the traditional flipping of switches for each individual fixture. Home automation intends to keep the physical interaction of the user with the actual hardware as minimal as possible. In the recent present and the not-so-distant past, the concept of home automation was built on top of mobile operating systems (mostly Android or iOS), where the user was able to control the whole house using just a mobile device or a tablet rather than interacting with the switches of each individual device present in the house.

With the advent of Interactive Voice Assistants, the concept of home automation has transcended to the level where a user can control a home with just their voice. The actual concept of home automation is very broad and a complete solution will include a wide array of sensors. In this chapter, we will demonstrate the concept of home automation with respect to Voice-Based Personal Assistants using a key feature provided in almost every automated home, which is the gathering of information regarding climate/ambience (temperature, humidity, and so on). We will create a solution that includes an ambient sensor, a mobile app, and Alexa, from which a user can get the ambience details of their house by just asking Alexa.

Ambience monitoring solutions are not only used for home automation, but also in various warehouses (where it is imperative that the products are maintained at a certain temperature/humidity) due to the fact that they can transmit ambience data over long ranges, both over Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth (BLE). However, those solutions are also more expensive and difficult to procure. Hence, for our needs, we will be using a popular sensor-prototyping solution called CC2650STK (popularly known as SensorTag) manufactured by Texas Instruments, that is small, easily available, perfectly fits with the home automation concept, and can be easily purchased from hobby/electronics stores or online from the Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) website, or Amazon, for a mere US$45-50.

For more information, please refer to: http://www.ti.com/tool/CC2650STK

The CC2650STK, or the SensorTag, is even smaller than a credit card, operates on a single coin cell battery, and includes 10 low-power, tiny MEMS sensors:

• Light
• Digital microphone
• Magnetic sensor
• Humidity
• Magnetometer
• Pressure
• Accelerometer
• Gyroscope
• Ambient temperature
• Object temperature

All these sensors are assembled in a small package, the details of which are shown in the following diagram:

Figure 6.1: Elements of a CC2650STK

This sensor kit/SensorTag can sense a lot more than temperature, however, for the purpose of prototyping our skill, we'll just limit ourselves to interrogating the ambient temperature sensor.

The overall system that we will eventually develop will also include a mobile app, which will interact with the CC2650STK SensorTag over BLE and will upload the temperature readings to the Firebase backend.

At the production level, we won't need the mobile app at all, as most practical sensors are fully capable and configured to upload data to backends over Wi-Fi. However, since we are prototyping, we are resorting to this solution.

Those readings can then be fetched from the Firebase backend by the Lambda and presented to the user when the user prompts Alexa for them.

Designing the Ambience Manager Skill

Our Ambience Manager Skill w...