AlexaPi + IFTTT

We made Amazon ECHO(For video tutorial on DIY Amazon ECHO click here) with our RPi board not just for asking questions. Today we will integrate Alexa with IFTTT to do amazing stuffs like,

• Controlling Home appliances
• Playing music on the phone
• Add any task to your ToDo list and get feedback on your phone via sms

and many more such stuffs. So let’s begin the fun,

IFTTT stands for If This Then That. In this, we need to provide a condition and an action to be performed when the condition is satisfied. Let me give you an example based on one of my project “IOT Button” that, If the button is pressed, then post a status on my Facebook wall. Hope it got clear to you with this example. We called this statement as a recipe. For Alexa to do such stuffs , we need to create different recipes in IFTTT.com.

In this video, I have shown you how you can create recipe for controlling appliances via Alexa. So now in this article,I’ll show you how you can ask Alexa to play music on your phone. First logIn to your IFTTT account and go to My Recipes>Create a Recipe. You will get a page like this,

Here “this” is the condition and “that” is the action to be performed if the condition is satisfied. In both “this” and “that” , you will get a number of channels or services to choose form.

Out of these many channels, for our project we gonna use Alexa for the condition, and Andriod for the action. From Alexa, we will be generating a specific phrase like, play music on my phone, to trigger the condition. And as soon as the condition is triggered, action will be performed according to our recipe.So let’s start with the recipe.

Click on “this” from “if this then that” phrase. Then from the channels, you need to select Amazon Alexa.After that, you will get a page like this,

For our recipe, we gonna select the first option i.e. Say a specific phrase. You can explore all the other options for different recipes. After selecting the first option you will have to type a phrase through which you want to trigger the condition. Just like I have typed, play music on my phone.

click on Create Trigger. Now the condition is provided, after that we need to provide the action to be performed whenever the condition triggers. For that click on “that“.

For the action also you need to select one out of many channels available. For our project, we will be selecting Android Device channel. you need to link your phone with this channel. Just install IFTTT app on your android phone. In that you will get a lot options like playing music, updating wallpaper, mute ringtone. turn on and off bluetooth etc. You can explore all the actions but for our recipe we will select Play Music as an action to be performed. After that click on Create Action.

So now the last step, just click on create recipe to initiate this recipe. So whenever you will say “Alexa Trigger play music on my phone” it will play music on your registered smart phone.

For codes and other details regarding this project and many other visit me website, www.techiesms.com