Friday Hack Chat: Hacking Voice Assistants

July 11, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

The future of consumer electronics is electronic voice assistants, at least that’s what the manufacturers are telling us. Everything from Alexas to Google Homes to Siris are invading our lives, and if predictions hold, your next new car might just have a voice assistant in it. It’s just a good thing we have enough samples of Majel Barrett’s voice for a quality virtual assistant.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about voice interfaces. There are hundreds of Alexa and Google Home hacks around, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. What else can we do with these neat pieces of computer hardware, and how do we get it to do that?

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be Nadine Lessio, a designer and technologist out of Toronto with a background in visual design and DIY peripherals. Nadine holds an MDes from OCADU where she spent her time investigating the Internet of Things through personal assistants. Currently, she’s working at OCADUs Adaptive Context Environments Lab where she’s researching how humans and devices work together.

During this Hack Chat, Nadine will be talking about voice assistants and answering questions like:

What languages can be used to program voice assistants
How do you use voice and hardware together?
What goes into the UX of a voice assistant?
How do these assistants interface with microcontrollers, Pis, and other electronics platforms?

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Hack Chat Event Page and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week is just like any other, and we’ll be gathering ’round our video terminals at noon, Pacific, on Friday, July 13th. Need a countdown timer? Yes you do.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Build Your Own P-Brain

January 26, 2017 by Rich Hawkes 27 Comments

I don’t think we’ll call virtual assistants done until we can say, “Make me a sandwich” (without adding “sudo”) and have a sandwich made and delivered to us while sitting in front of our televisions. However, they are not completely without use as they are currently – they can let you know the time, weather and traffic, schedule or remind you of meetings and they can also be used to order things from Amazon. [Pat AI] was interested in building an open source, extensible, virtual assistant, so he built P-Brain.

Think of P-Brain as the base for a more complex virtual assistant. It is designed from the beginning to have more skills added on in order to grow its complexity, the number of things it can do. P-Brain is written in Node.js and using a Node package called Natural, P-Brain parses your request and matches it to a ‘skill.’ At the moment, P-Brain can get the time, date and weather, it can get facts from the internet, find and play music and can flip a virtual coin for you. Currently, P-Brain only runs in Chrome, but [Pat AI] has plans to remove that as a dependency. After the break, [Pat AI] goes into some detail about P-Brain and shows off its capabilities. In an upcoming video, [Pat AI]’s going to go over more details about how to add new skills. Continue reading “Build Your Own P-Brain” →

“Alexa, Order Everyone In San Diego A Doll House”

January 7, 2017 by Jenny List 99 Comments

Every day it seems there is a new Alexa story in the news, as for the moment the Amazon voice assistant is in the ascendant over its rivals from Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Today’s slice of Alexa weirdness comes courtesy of a newsreader in San Diego, who inadvertently triggered Alexa-enabled devices within hearing distance of a television to buy doll houses when he reported on a Dallas child’s accidental purchase.

It’s unclear whether any doll houses were dispatched or whether the Echos and Dots merely started the process and asked their owners for confirmation, but we hope it serves to draw attention to the risks associated with an always-on and always-listening device. We’ve looked at how the technology has seemingly circumvented the normal privacy concerns of our own community, so it’s hardly surprising that this kind of incident catches the greater public completely unprepared. It’s one thing for the denizens of a hackspace to troll the owner of a Dot by adding embarrassing products to their wish list, but against a less-informed user who hasn’t worked out how to lock down the device’s purchasing abilities, it’s not too far-fetched to imagine a criminal attack.

Voice assistants are clearly going to become a ubiquitous feature of our lives, and it is inevitable that there will be more such unfortunate incidents which will serve to educate the public about their privacy before the technology reaches maturity. This particular story is definitely Not A Hack, though as our “Alexa” tag shows the devices have huge potential to bring a new dimension to our work. It’s up to all of us in our community to ensure that the voice assistant owners in our lives are adequately educated about them, and maybe resist the urge to say “Alexa, add all the Hackaday merchandise to my wish list!”.

How Has Amazon Managed To Make Hackers Love Alexa?

December 19, 2016 by Jenny List 114 Comments

Our hackspace has acquired an Amazon Dot, courtesy of a member. It mostly seems to be used as a source of background music, but it has also spawned a seemingly never-ending new entertainment in which the hackspace denizens ceaselessly bait their new electronic companion with ever more complex and esoteric requests. From endless rephrasing and careful enunciation of obscure early reggae artists to try to settle a musical argument to hilarious mis-hearing on the part of our silicon friend, the fun never stops. “Alexa, **** off!” it seems results in “I’m sorry, I can’t find a device of that name on this network”.

That is just the experience of one hackspace, but it evidently does not end there. Every other day it seems that new projects using Alexa pass through the Hackaday timeline, so it looks as though Amazon’s online personal assistant has been something of a hit within our community.

Fair enough, you might say, we’re always early adopters of any new technology. But it’s a development over which I wonder; am I alone in finding it surprising? It’s worth taking a moment to look at the subject.

Continue reading “How Has Amazon Managed To Make Hackers Love Alexa?” →