Friday, April 01, 2016

Poor man's Alexa Voice Service solution

Amazon posted a project to demonstrates how to access and test the Alexa Voice Service using a Java client (running on a Raspberry Pi).

https://github.com/amzn/alexa-avs-raspberry-pi

The setup can be done on a Ubuntu machine with a couple of minor tweaks in the instructions, without spending money on a Raspberry Pi and misc extension hw.

Quick notes here:

  • follow all the steps that involved the code and amazon site to setup the dev account, tokens.
  • ignore all the steps involved in setting up Raspberry Pi
  • setup the ubuntu machine
    • sudo apt-get install nodejs
    • sudo apt-get install mvn
    • follow the steps to set up vlc (not entire sure if this is really needed, but I suspect the client use the service)
    • follow the steps to install oracle jdk 8, except the step about upgrading java using ./install-java8.sh. Using open jdk 8 have problem when building with mvn, where it failed with some cert issues when downloading from maven repo. Didn't further troubleshoot, just use the Oracle jdk.
    • change the samples/companionService/package.json to start with nodejs instead. (Or maybe could be done without code change by just installing nodejs-legacy instead. Didn't try)
"scripts": {
"start": "nodejs ./bin/www"
},


Shortened instruction will be posted here: https://github.com/chunmeng/alexa-avs-raspberry-pi