-
-
-
Joe's internal organs
-
-
Surgery scars
Inspiration
The original idea was to make a teddy bear talk like they do in that movie TED. We saw Amazon's new Alexa software had become open to third parties, so we decided to do a hack with it running off a raspberry pi. Given the fact that this hackathon is taking place at UCLA, we decided to do something Bruin-themed with Alexa. We hope our hack can serve as an example of the exciting possibilities of taking everyday objects like a stuffed animal and animating it with intelligence.
What it does
Joe Bruin runs an open source version of Alexa on a Raspberry Pi with two custom-built Alexa skills (both based off of example skills from https://github.com/amzn/alexa-skills-kit-js, namely the Reindeer Games and Hello World skills). But in addition to these custom UCLA skills, Joe Bruin will talk to you about the weather, tell you a joke, or perform one of the many other build in Alexa functions.
How We Built It
We performed open heart surgery on the bear, cramming a Raspberry Pi into teddy bear along with a 3.5 mm jack speaker and USB microphone for Alexa's I/O capabilities. We initially tried to cannibalize the bears original speakers, but after that effort was unsuccessful, we decided to just use the bear's built in LED. We used AWS SDK to modify the examples skills we found on Github and tailor them to be UCLA themed. Once the hardware was hooked up, we were able to create skills and intents through online voice services.
Challenges we faced
One challenge we faced was trying to do a hardware-intensive project at a mainly software hackathon using mostly things we found at a grocery store!! We did not bring all of the necessary tools to realize our vision for the talking teddy, so we struggled to find the right equipment for a long time. We were new to both the Amazon Skills Kit and the Raspberry Pi system, so our greatest challenge was familiarizing ourselves with these new interfaces and ensuring that they worked together correctly.
Use Cases
We believe that Joe Bruin serves as an exciting demonstration of the opportunities of third party development with Alexa. With Amazon's ASK, Alexa is extremely customizable - Joe could be turned into an assistant for any computable operation you can imagine, from a child's toy to an office personal assistant. An important difference between Joe Bruin and Amazon's Echo is price - while both perform similar functionality, with the Raspberry Pi, a working Alexa assistant could be easily made for under $40.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.