Inspiration
In 2015 Amazon Echo was the most sold item over $100 on Black Friday. In early 2017, headlines regarding the CIA requesting access to Amazon data stores regarding a murder case made existing Echo owners think twice about their shiny new electronic personal assistant.
What it does
By using local voice recognition, we can leave our Amazon Echo muted and use a external chipset to listen for a hot-word. Hot-word detection will occur offline and completely "outside" of the Echo itself. Once the hot-word is detected, the circuit toggles the mute switch and action button, enabling the microphone array and toggling Alexa's listening mode, providing the seamless Alexa experience you are used to.
How you built it
Using a Raspberry Pi Zero with the Snowboy voice recognition library, an additional microphone, and a small amount of circuitry to toggle the Echo's button. Python code running on the RasPi executes a loop listening for a hot-word, in this case "CIA".
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