Amazon's Raspberry Pi Guide Lets Coders Build An Echo (bbc.com) 47
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Amazon has published an online guide explaining how to access its virtual assistant Alexa via a Raspberry Pi. The walkthrough includes access to the necessary app data and certificates in order to link the budget computer up to the tech giant's servers. Amazon says that users require at least the second-generation model, released in February 2015, as well as: a plug-in USB microphone, microSD card, ethernet cable, Wi-Fi wireless adapter, mouse, keyboard, and screen. The coding involved is limited to typing in sets of commands, but the guide explains the purpose of each one. Users also need to register for an Amazon Developer Account, which they can get for free.
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I think no first generation boards is because they lack the power and ram necessary. It's a cool thing, I'm surprised frankly to see it but very excited at the possibilities.
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I have a first generation (First run model) of the pi.
With only 256megs of ram, it is hard to do much with it. ;)
The second generation had 512meg and that made a lot of difference! I have a couple of them.
Then there was the second generation B+ with the extra ports, I have 3 or 4 of them laying around.
Now with the third generation having 4cores and 1g of ram, there is a lot you can do with it. That reminds me, I need to order a couple.
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With only 256megs of ram, it is hard to do much with it."
Don't underestimate what you can do with 256M of RAM and a bit of imagination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_embedded_computer_systems_on_board_the_Mars_rovers [wikipedia.org]
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With only 256megs of ram, it is hard to do much with it.
Back before your were born, around 1995, 256MB was not only enough to run Windows 95 with PhotoShop smoothly; it would have been considered an excessive amount of memory.
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I think you have your timing off. Around 1995, 16MB was the high end. My dad was working in DTP since 1994 and had to shell out tons of money back then for 8MB RAM to run his Ventura smoothly.
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RAM was bloody expensive at the time but Apple's Quadra 900, released in 1991, supported 256MB.
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But more importantly the comment wouldn't be as condescending
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Correct. I remember ordering 128MB for a Sun workstation at work ca. 1995. This was considered huge, and the engineer who came to install it was more impressed by the fact that I was able to completely fill it with data from an actual problem in a few minutes.
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Back before your were born, around 1995, 256MB was not only enough to run Windows 95 with PhotoShop smoothly; it would have been considered an excessive amount of memory.
And yet, it is not that time any more, and programming libraries include a great deal of memory-consuming cruft. 256MB is now a piffling little amount of RAM, and quite pathetic really. If you were only ever going to use the Pi embedded, it might be enough... but let's face it, even digital signage PCs regularly come with 2GB now.
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The first computer I worked on in 1960, an IBM 1620, was the size of an office desk. It cost ten times more than the value of my parents' house and had 40k decimal digits of memory ( With a 10ms memory cycle time), just enough to support a Fortran II compiler.
It was the physics department's computer and we did a lot with it. It was light years better than our mechanical Frieden calculators.
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Re: Bit of a fail (Score:5, Informative)
Just built one of these today actually. Only took me about 2 hours to get through setting up the Amazon keys/policies and the pi software and get it to successfully connect.
There are 3 things that do make it a little bit of a pain-
1- The setup is client/server with the client using Java and the server using Node.js. So there's multiple config files and dependencies to set up, hence multiple points of failure. This can make troubleshooting more difficult if there are issues.
2- you have to log onto Amazon.com via a web browser and generate a token EVERY time you start the Java client. This is noticeably awkward and an extra step. (I don't know how long the token lasts either.)
3- The license terms prohibit having the unit always listening like the Echo does. So you have to press a button or interact with the device somehow to activate 'listen' mode.
For the most part these are limitations that I can understand. Amazon is providing sample code for Alexa AVS to try to increase adoption. The github repo is designed for developers who want to incorporate Alexa into their products, not for end-users.
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> So you have to press a button or interact with the device somehow to activate 'listen' mode.
Some of us would consider this a feature.
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Do you really think Microsoft wants to re-release access to it's latest bit of AI which ended up turning racist?
Re: Where is Google? Where is Microsoft? (Score:5, Funny)
Not Microsoft's fault for developing an AI that accidentally imitated racist humans and ended up racist. In fact, this whole PC shit needs to end. You can't even tell the truth anymore if it offends anyone. Like the Harvard professor who mentioned true facts about women in mathematics and sciences. If the facts don't correspond to the feminist PC narrative, they must be suppressed.
Science is no longer about finding the truth, bit rather about just trying to justify whatever the fashionable progressive narrative is (equality, global warming, anti-war, anti-gun, CEOs and corporations are evil, and so on)
Oh, hey! Microsoft's Slashbot is still running!
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The moral of the Microsoft AI fail is not about political correctness, etc. The moral is don't depend too much on artificial intelligence programmed by retards..
Here, I fixed that for you.
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Oh, hey! Microsoft's Slashbot is still running!
Its part of the new Personal assistant for Republicans, code named "Trumpy".
Ask Trumpy a question, and it will give you the winning answer, you can trust it.
Re: Where is Google? Where is Microsoft? (Score:1)
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Not sure if troll or serious - but it appears to me that this is just a competitor to Siri and Cortana.
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Of course. There's demand for natural-language personal assistants, and serious money to be made by running one.
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That's exactly what Alexa is - a competitor for Siri, Cortana, and Google Now. Each has strengths and weaknesses. The best thing about Alexa is that developers can develop Alexa "skills" that let you use it (her?) for things like home automation, which are things that you cannot yet do with Siri or Cortana or Google Now's unnamed voice. Alexa has grown considerably more useful over time as both Amazon's own developers and third parties develop skills.
Alexa rules for playing music. You can play songs on Prim
So Amazon can use my hardware to listen to me? (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, why on earth would I build my own Echo, using my own hardware, so that it can probably 'listen' or make use of my data in some way to further the march of Amazon? I don't think so, as they say. There's lots of non-Amazon home automation projects and, if there are none that suit, just buy some relays and ping the GPIO pins with your own programs. As they (we) say, if it's free, then you are the product.
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Coders? What coders? (Score:3)
The coding involved is limited to typing in sets of commands
That's not "coding". That's typing a set of commands to run something that someone else "coded".