Revb

Amazon Echo is a futuristic smart speaker designed to act as a home assistant. It can take voice commands in order to answer questions, translate languages, turn on and off household appliances, play music, set timers and a whole host of other daily tasks.

Today we’ll be using IBM watson and Intel’s Edison chip to build the foundations for this technology you can futher customise to your own liking. As it will be using IBM Watson it will learn and improve its voice recognition as you use it.

Requirements (What you will need to complete this project):

* An Intel Edison with Arduino Expansion Board

* A USB microphone

* A Bluetooth speaker

* Credentials for IBM Bluemix Account

* Knowledge of JavaScript and Node.js

To prepare the Intel Edison with Arduino Expansion Board follow this tutorial.

You will need to pull the source code from this Git repository.

You will need to establish a terminal to your Edison. Guide.

3.1 Connect Bluetooth Speaker
Make your Bluetooth device discoverable. You will probably need to push the pair button on the back of the speaker (if there is any)

Start the Bluetooth Manager on the Edison and start scanning for devices, with the following commands:

root@edison:~# rfkill unblock bluetooth

root@edison:~# bluetoothctl

Find your device in the list and pair to it.

i.e.: [bluetooth] pair C0:DE:76:C7:BA:C7

3.2 Connect USB Microphone To use a USB microphone you will need to switch the Edison into host mode by flipping the microswitch towards the large USB port.You will need an external DC power supply to be able to use the microphone. Make the Edison recognize the microphone as an audio source.

root@edison:~# arecord -l

4.1 Open Intel XDK IoT Edition

4.2 Import the Intel XDK Project that you previously pulled

4.3 Connect to your IoT Device

4.4 Upload the project to your device

4.5 Run the project