The Echo has been available by invitation for about 6 months, many community members have it and some are signed up for the developer program. Amazing far field voice recognition. But the “shouldn’t take much” is a bit optimistic. See this topic for the heavy duty technical discussions:
So I got into the Amazon Echo beta SDK, they still don’t want people sharing code and such - so I wanted to share what I can without getting into any details that they shared with us.
NOTE: Not going to get into the SDK, docs, code, etc - until they say we can… sorry… if you are in the SDK and PM me I’d be happy to chat
I made a quick video of the Echo driving my lights and sonos, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_N83OkPBdw
You could probably do all this with just a smartthings app, but I used a bridge app to do the communication between smartthings web services and the amazon cloud.
I used some smartthings REST API sample code I found to make a quick endpoint to drive my house with oauth for auth.
Then made a simple app with just a couple commands; turn on some lights, turn off some …
And this topic for a nontechnical overview:
BREAKING NEWS AUGUST 21
Official Echo integration is here! And it works great! Please see the new FAQ devoted just to the official SmartThings/Echo integration:
And below is the original FAQ showing the various kinds of integration available before the Official version was available. But unless you’re running your own server and want to hack a bunch of stuff, just look at the official one, it’s fantastic.
I am quadriparetic, so voice control is very important to me. And I am amazed at the quality of the Amazon Echo farfield voice recognition technology. So I’ve been keeping a close eye on the current state of unofficial integration.
I got mine for $99 through the invitation process. It was a several month wait and you needed to be a prime member. It is now available to anyone to o…