Home Lab Assistant with Wolfram Alpha - Pt II

As I made a mental list of the parts, parameters, and arrangement of the homemade JARVIS; I realized that Amazone Echo would be more than adequate. Echo has an excellent API, an explosively growing ecosystem, and a solid list of integrations ready-to-go.

Resources

This week, on Product Hunt, someone debuted a huge list of skills for Alexa. Its called Skills.wtf. Additionally, there are plenty of results on Github for Alexa and Echo. I’m going to pair a few Sonos speakers with Alexa using this integration. There is also a great bot-building framework called Claudia that will likely come in handy.

Ben Tossel also wrote a great article on the current status of voice assistants.

Cost

The major drawback to my original idea was the time-cost. I love making things, even if I get bored during the build, causing something to look like the antithesis of production-grade. However, this was almost too tiny with which to bother. More importantly, the Amazon Echo is cheap, as are the Sonos speakers. If I damage them by accident in the workshop, they will be easy and simple to replace.

Conclusion

I ordered an Echo and three Sonos speakers so that I could allocate more time to something more interesting.