I should clarify that there is a bit of artistic license on the title calling this a $10 Echo, there are 2 caveats;
Its only about $10 the CHIP is a "$9 Computer" plus tax & shipping etc. and this hack then requires a speaker, microphone and a button, however you may well have these lying around of have another device like an old speakerphone or something that you could gut and put the CHIP into as a new brain.
The other point is that its not really a full Echo, the Echo is a hardware appliance that implements Far Field Voice Technology, Wake Word Detection, A High Quality Bluetooth Speaker, Support for various media service (Prime Music, Audible, Pandora etc) and finally the Alexa Voice Assistant. This hack is really just access to the Alexa Voice Assistant without the wake word or far field tech.
So its about 90% of the functionality for a much lower price. Personally I have an Echo in my dining room which is great when walking around the house but I built this to use on my desk when I want to trigger home automation features without shouting downstairs.
Yeah I just need to strip out the auth keys etc. and rebase it before i make it public. I'll try and get it posted this week sometime, check back on weds.
One of the more impressive things about the Echo is its far-field mic. I've used a lot of different voice recognition technologies, but Echo blows everything else away in terms of being able to speak in a normal voice from the other side of the room and have it still understand you. The actual intelligence behind the service may be lacking (or at least behind some of the competition), but for a general-purpose home application, the mic (in my opinion) is a significant part of Echo's reliability and success.
Yeah, Echo is a good listener. In fact, when I ran the video on the OP's site and he said "Alexa, what time is it?" my Echo in the other room woke up and told me the time :)
That's actually one of my concerns about voice-driven interfaces, absent some sort of voice print authentication or tactile confirmation button. Imagine standing up in a crowded room and shouting "OK Google, delete everything!", or "OK Google, recite the first thouand digits of pi!"
Isn't that exactly why iPhone / iOS will ask you to say 'Hey Siri' several times when you activate the feature? I assumed it was tuning the recognition to key on just [approx] that voice.
It's not "secure" in any sense, but it cuts down on false positives and perhaps some very juvenile hacking attempts. Any professional hacker will generate a close-enough voiceprint that you can't use voice recognition inherently (purely passively) as authentication any time soon.
This was a common way to troll Xbox players: If they used speakers, shout "Xbox Off" loud enough via the voice chat (in a multiplayer game) and their devices turned off.
That could be a fun programming exercise for one of these devices you can hook into Alexa, see if you can catch unauthorised voices quickly and effectively without badly impacting response times.
e.g. you could do it by buffering the request, checking and submitting once you're confident about authenticity, but then you'd be delaying submission and response, depending on how much you'd need to buffer to gain sufficient confidence that the individual is authorised.
In my limited experience using Echo at my parents house over the holidays I was distinctly not impressed by the Echo's abilities to understand voice from across the room. We often had to repeat ourselves, only louder and slower to get the Echo to understand us. We do not have strong accents.
As anecdata goes, I have an Echo. It was an impulse buy when it came on pre-sale, then didn't know what to do when I actually received. I've been using it for quite a while now and the voice recognition is amazing, but the software is not really there yet. I can tell it to set up a timer from the kitchen (which is around a corner from the device) without much of an issue, even with my, somewhat strong, Argentine accent.
Many of the commands it "fails" at is when it tries to "guess" what I might have meant to say because it can't find something in its database. For example, if I give it a wrong name for a song (say "Alexa play She's Leaving by The Beatles" it might play some song called "She's Leaving" by some other band because it can't find that song under The Beatles.
Of course you're technically correct, but I find it quite common for Americans to understand that "no accent" refers to General American, even if they're not aware of the term "General American."
It's not just pedantics. I live in the UK, and some people who speak something between Received Pronunciation and the BBC accent also think they have no accent. People can't hear their own accents and presume they don't have any.
But this is more than just my bias for my own accent (which is very close to GA). When I meet other Americans with other regional accents, they will often describe me as having "no accent."
> a horrible job providing answers to even simple questions.
If you think of it as a device that performs specific actions (i.e., plays audio, gives a weather forecast, sets a timer, etc.) via an voice interface, rather than a general intelligence that can answer random questions, you're going to have a better time.
THIS. It baffles me how people expect devices such as the Echo to understand every nuance of human language, then get annoyed when it can't answer your overly-complex or vague question. Voice interfaces for me are always reduced to clearly enunciated and simple commands such as "set timer 10 minutes" or "play album Anjunadeep 4". You'll have a much better time than saying "alexaplaymesomealbumsbyaboveandbyond"
Agreed. It's an array with 7 MEMS mics, which allows the Echo to do beamforming so they can essentially focus on the speaker while rejecting most of the other sound.
There have been advances in deep learning based speech recognition to reject noise - http://usa.baidu.com/deep-speech-lessons-from-deep-learning/ for instance, but clean audio source helps massively, especially if you are trying to talk from any distance instead of being right next to the mic.
I haven't seen open source libraries for state of the art RNN/LSTM based speech recognition, anyone know if they exist?
MEMS mics have been taking over electret mics recently, they are way smaller and have better SNR (at equivalent size).
Haven't looked into the software/beamforming part yet - does anyone know if there are open source libraries for that?
Some MEMS mics can also do ultrasound range, opening up pretty interesting possibilities for cheapo LIDAR type echolocation with a mic array - but that's for the next project :)
I don't know about the specifics of characterizing beam-pattern, etc. I am pretty sure, Kinect 1.0 can be more directional in spite of having fewer microphones because the microphones are cardioid, as opposed to the uni/omni-directional ones used in the Echo. Also, some parts of the design of the Kinect speech processing pipeline is public. You can read about in Ivan Tashev's (of MSR) book [1], IEEE Signal Processing Magazine article [2], and some presentation videos he has online [3]. Also, see his publication list, a lot of papers are relevant to the Kinect speech pipeline http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/ivantash/publicat...
Not to mention smartphones seem to be explicitly designed to not provide this use case. Where is my always listening Google Now? If I have to take my phone out of my pocket and unlock it, I may as well type the question myself.
The Moto X and its successors have had this feature for a while. Your phone can be sitting on the other side of the room, completely off, and you can say a certain catch phrase to activate Google Now.
I can usually activate Google Now from a few feet away on my Moto X (2013) but it can't understand what I'm asking after that. I have to get much closer for it to work.
Makes sense I guess. The "listen for the trigger" bit is done locally on those Motos (I've got the 2014 variant) but really all it needs to do is keep an "ear" open for that one phrase so it's probably got a better margin, only helped by local processing. The bit of audio that comprises the query has to get compressed and interpreted on the server side (not to mention the fact that it consists of a much wider variety of possible content to be parsed) so that can't help. I guess a dedicated chip that's just constantly asking "did anyone say 'OK Google?" has an easier job than a remote process asking "wtf does that fuzzy bit of compressed audio mean?"
(obviously being silly and oversimplifying but same idea)
All recent Nexus phones have always-on hotword support. I just tested it from 20 feet ("OK Google, what's the weather like tomorrow") and it worked fine.
This is a pretty cool experiment. As someone that recently worked on an app that was doing speech to text in near and far field, calling this a $10 echo is like calling a Honda Civic a $15K Ferrari. I'd love to see the video of the author speaking to this microphone from 10' away, or even 5' away in a room with no padding.
The Echo's ability to do voice to text is like nothing that's ever come before it based on my experience building, and speaking with a consultant in the field that worked on the Echo team.
I totally agree, hence my comments about artistic license in the title!
One of the issues right now is that people kinda assume that Echo and Alexa are the same thing hopefully as more 3rd party devices come to market using Alexa the difference will emerge. I'm thinking of doing a follow on post explaining the differences.
Also there's not really a generic name for the type of appliance that the Echo is like smartphone, tablet, browser etc. I wonder if echo will become like hoover in years to come?
I'm not comfortable with the idea of everyone having far-field microphones in their homes. Cell phone spying is bad enough. If these become widespread, then ten years from now instead of a political debate about call metadata it'll be a debate about literally every word ever spoken.
That's a worry that I share. The good thing about hacks like the OP's is that they push us further in the direction of this technology being open and controlled by the user. We need more of that.
> I'm not comfortable with the idea of everyone having far-field microphones in their homes.
That's the problem with progress and technology. It will happen regardless of how comfortable you are with it. In fact, if it helps those with power to maintain or extend their power it will happen. If it tends to limit their power it will be squashed and marginalized.
False. Technology can proceed with privacy in mind. The Echo didn't have to push things to the cloud. It was, however, constructed to do so both for Amazon's benefit (data) and the consumer's benefit (ease of setup and use).
The trend you cite will happen because of ignorance, not progress.
It adds convenience to most services to connect to the Internet, so most of the do by default. So long as the device is connected, state-sponsored actors will find ways to eavesdrop even if the device wasn't originally designed to send audio over the wire.
I wouldn't be so upset if the divice firmware was completely open source and easily user modifiable (android does not meet this, 100gb source download is not easy to modify).
I don't see how it's different than a smartphone. Everyone carries with them a little microphone and GPS now. Who cares about using voice recognition in the home?
And the real voice recognition should be turned off 99% of the time. It should just passively listen for a keyword before using any cloud service.
>I don't see how it's different than a smartphone. Everyone carries with them a little microphone and GPS now. Who cares about using voice recognition in the home?
"You already have the flu, why worry about getting gastroenteritis?"
>And the real voice recognition should be turned off 99% of the time. It should just passively listen for a keyword before using any cloud service.
On tools like OP's link, or Jasper, etc. you have the source and you can verify that it's actually not sending out data permanently.
With the Echo, you're just hoping Amazon didn't do exactly that. You could watch the network activity, but that would just tell you that some data is sent back, sometimes.
Any recommendations for microphones that are (a) high-quality, (b) cheap (under US$5.00), (c) small (under a cubic centimeter), and (d) with analog output (such as a 1/8-inch plug)?
Note that high-quality and cheap are not contradictory requirements. iPhones and other smartphones have extremely high-quality microphones (and they are tiny) and must certainly cost much less than $5 as a part, but they seem impossible to find. Every off-the-shelf mic under $5 that I've tried has been garbage in terms of sound quality, and even much more expensive ones have not been great.
Good mics certainly exist. Here's a compact analog microphone I own that has fantastic sound quality:
But it's ridiculous that this microphone costs 6x as much as the CHIP and 10x as the RPi Zero. You can't build a product around the CHIP or the RPi if an essential part is that expensive.
If the author of this is reading, it might help to make the first reference to "Alexa" be a hyperlink to "what the heck is Alexa". (I know I can google it, but...)
"Alexa" is the assistant-in-the-machine that comes on the Amazon Echo (just as an iPhone 6 comes with Siri). You activate the Echo by saying "Alexa". The author is probably guessing that in context, you'll make the connection between the title "The $10 Echo" and the Echo's hotword (Alexa).
I agree it'd be useful if there was a brief explanation at the beginning of the article.
> Over on Reddit, a post suggests that there are 3 main ‘instances’ (or server farms) for Siri in the United States, and at least one for every other country.
> This information allegedly comes — albeit second-hand — from Apple’s lead cloud architect, who says that every instance of Siri runs on 32 powerful HP servers with a total of 1024 cores and 32 terrabytes of RAM apiece. That certainly makes the new Mac Pro look long in the tooth.
> Specifically, each instance of Siri is made up of 4 HP c7k enclosures made up of 8 HP server blades each, with memory upgrades to 1TB of RAM.
> According to the post, if one server dies, it’s simply removed and another one slapped in, with no downtime.
Granted, there are a lot of people yacking at Siri at a given time, but still. You probably need a fair amount of horsepower to pull this off.
Apple has also said that Siri gets 1 billion requests per week, so by those numbers each core can handle ~10k requests/week, using its share of 32GB of RAM. Doesn't seem that much.
They talked a bit more about the Siri setup at a talk they gave for the Mesos guys (Siri runs on Mesos with a custom schedule Apple wrote - one of the biggest Mesos installs out there)
It looks like you can use it for non-commercial purposes but I imagine that they'd make money a few ways: indirectly through publicity and familiarity (the more people are used to having it, the more might use Amazon's commercial version or just Amazon stuff in general), directly (through licensing it for commercial use), and via improvements they make to their service as a result of people using the free version for non-commercial applications (better voice training and interpretation).
That's just a guess but it's similar to what Google does with AOSP and Google Android.
I love my echo (alexa), especially the convenience of "no button but wake word" when I have my hands full in the kitchen.
That said, google voice is so much better at parsing my questions that I'd pay a bunch of money for another standalone device with wake word which would integrate with with google voice.
Any chance of hacking that, or linking your device with both? (Ask Amazon / Ask Google)
Google's question parsing is ridiculously good. You can also do neat things like say "When I get to work, remind me to email John" and you'll get a notification when you arrive. I don't have an Echo, but I imagine it can't do such contextual things.
You could get a dedicated Android phone/tablet, and leave it always plugged into a charger somewhere. I just tested it on my Phone (LG G3 Android 5.0.1), and I'm able to get my phone to respond to "Ok, Google" questions, even with the screen off.
Though the microphone probably won't be nearly as good as the Echo, and from the setup it seems like you have to train "Ok, Google" to respond to your voice, so I don't know if it will work with multiple users.
I love my Nest Thermostat, and I know they've got "Protect" as the smoke/CO detector. I'd LOVE if Google would release an "Assist" product that was the Echo form factor powered by Google's agent engine, and I could mount it on the ceiling in each of my rooms similar to how smoke detectors are (hard wired to mains with battery backup).
I have an Echo and the mic array is fantastic. And the idea of having one in every room for localized interaction is great. But the idea of such a good mic in every room is scary if you consider bad and/or state actors.
I've got an old Android phone always plugged in, connected to a THX system on top of my fridge/freezer, for doing things like automatically playing music in the morning. Exploring what other things I can get it to do with Tasker atm.
OK Google works, but the mic really isn't as good as the array on Echo. I've been looking into external mics for Android - will test with simple omni mics first but ideally an external array mic would be the best choice.
Buy an high end phone with a good mic and you can choose between GoogleNow and Siri (and more). Or if you have a SmartTV in your kitchen, you can use that too (Samsung, LG, etc),
I backed for just one board, and then they offered to let me add more without paying additional shipping, so I added a second, $18 for the CHIPs, $5ish to ship them. They are en route from China. To be fair, I only just succeeded in ordering a Pi Zero from Adafruit, $5 for the Pi, $4 shipping...
I have to be honest, I got an echo for Christmas (thanks Mom!), and while it's really cool, it has only served to highlight how much amazon prime music sucks. In fact, it has only served to highlight to me how disconnected cloud music services are.
Google music has just about everything (now that it is connected to youtube), but amazon doesn't want to let its speakers play google music's music service because they want to sell you their own.
Actually the kickstarter did ship hence why I had my hands on one (well two actually) to do this hack. I backed the kickstarter back in May 2015.
The June2016 date is for orders placed on their store today which I think is the earliest they currently expect to have filled all the current pre-orders and later stage kickstarter backers. IIRC they're currently producing 5000 units a month.
Amazon doesn't care about selling the hardware. They'd be ecstatic if this caught on. It'd be like owning the kindle ecosystem without having to take a loss on the hardware.
They provide Alex-as-a-service: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-vo... ("Build for Free. Using AVS to power speech experiences on your devices is completely free.")
(Note: I'm guessing that this will be lower accuracy than the echo, since the echo's acoustic models are probably tuned for their hardware.)
compared with ok google and siri, echo is not much better (if not worse) in terms of intelligence. What made echo was the physical form factor.
Intelligence is hard to mimic, but physical form factor is not. All google or apple needs to do is come out with with a similar speaker/mic combo and it will totally blow echo out of the water.
I agree. I wish Google would build their own echo. The ability to do things like manage a calendar, text people, and all the other "Ok, Google" functions through an Echo-like device that also does what Amazon's Echo currently does would be fantastic. Alexa can't even tell me what is the stock price of Amazon and can't give me the current temperature without prattling off the entire weather update.
I guess they've just focused on getting the functionality available on devices you can already find (Android and iOS devices, TVs like the newer Sonys that run AndroidTV, etc). I see the appeal of a standalone device but I find that lots of times, the response may not translate well into audio-only so having a screen helps when you ask something and the best answer is a graph, text, or image.
Just a guess though. I'm surprised that wasn't included in that rather pricey wifi router they launched recently. It has a decent sized speaker in it but perhaps they decided not to enable it just yet. My guess is that they wanted to start selling the wifi routers but didn't think the voice stuff was up to snuff for a consumer application/selling point just yet.
If you build the device yourself, you can ensure it only uses the API at a time you control. For example, you might configure a trigger word that is recognized locally.
Silly. The traffic from the Echo has been studied extensively. Detection of the wake word is hardware-based. Nothing is recorded and sent until the wake word is uttered and after that only the part until you finish your question. If you are truly worried about spy devices, you should really consider dropping your cell phone in the toilet.
> The traffic from the Echo has been studied extensively. Detection of the wake word is hardware-based
For now, maybe. If some update changed this, how and when would you figure out?
I'd say it's not entirely silly to be worried about something in your home which is controlled by a third party and could turn into a spying device at any moment, even though it seems not to have become evil yet.
>If some update changed this, how and when would you figure out
The echo traffic always flows through your internet - it has no 3G/4G hardware, for example. If you want to do a pcap with tcpdump or similar, you can.
When I first received mine, I set up a packet capture on my linux firewall/ips/nat device and looked at traffic outbound to the internet from the echo. If I was particularly paranoid, I could leave this running 24/7 outputting to a pcap, and then watch that file for changes and get notifications whenever it did.
Honestly, if you're worried about this sort of thing, you shouldn't own a cell phone.
> If you are truly worried about spy devices, you should really consider dropping your cell phone in the toilet.
> Honestly, if you're worried about this sort of thing, you shouldn't own a cell phone.
People keep saying this but not owning a cell phone doesn't help against being in the vicinity of a far-field microphone connected to echo?
Then your idea about pcapping 24/7, I'm not sure what this data would look like, but given that the software emitting it is closed-source and auto-updating, wouldn't it change every other update or so? You'd have to re-reverse the data every time to see what it's actually sending, sounds like a lot of work, like keeping an eye on a young child to make sure it's not creating/getting into any trouble.
You can call it "paranoid", but I think by now we have all seen enough reports about these sorts of things going wrong (on purpose or by accident), it's more reasonable to say that you are okay trading convenience for privacy+security than calling the people who aren't, "paranoid". It's 2016.
BTW if you can make sense of the pcapped data sent out, that means it's not encrypted, right?
A paranoid fear would be that the Echo could be recording additional traffic (based on special stealthy trigger words maybe) and sending that traffic later, in conjunction with regular traffic recorded for the regular trigger word, so as to escape detection. It does sound a bit harder to pull off, I just wanted to point out that spying on the traffic won't get you perfect security if (as I expect) the traffic is encrypted.
> Honestly, if you're worried about this sort of thing, you shouldn't own a cell phone.
Fair point, but as further comments pointed out, taking one kind of risk doesn't mean you're OK with taking more of the same kind of risk. :)
I already take fair precautions against my cell phone, but I have to concede that, with radio firmwares being proprietary, it seems true that any cell phone nowadays is as risky as the echo.
That's not even remotely an ad hominem, though I imagine you just mean it's a fallacious argument in general.
That being said, hardly. We already know that law enforcement can use cell phones to spy on people. There is an abstract fear that the Echo might do this in the future (enough analysis has been done to know that it does not currently), yet we know for sure that cell phones can do it currently.
It is ad hominem because you implicate anyone who worries about one device to stop worrying because you can choose from a bouquet, some other flower they should be more worried about.
Gun safety says it's unwise to point a gun, even an unloaded or uncocked gun, at someone you don't wish to shoot. In the same vein, it's unsettling to have microphones and cameras around one's house _even_ if you suppose they are off. Because the latent ability is potential oppression.
Ad hominem is quite explicitly attacking the person who made the argument, and not the argument itself.
I believe the fallacy you're looking for is 'fallacy of relative privation', but even then, we're still not there. Fundamentally, the issue is this:
The fear is that the microphone could be used as a listening device. From the current factual information we have available, we know, at this time, that:
1) Law enforcement agencies can and do use cell phones as listening devices, both in intercepting calls and remotely enabling the microphone.
2) It is not possible to see all traffic that is flowing through your cell phone in many cases (iPhones, non-rooted Android phones, etc)
3) It is possible to see all traffic that is flowing through your home network. If it is encrypted you might not be able to determine the specific contents, but you still have the technical possibility to see when communication occurs
4) We do not currently see any evidence that the Echo performs any sort of recording or transmission of voice data outside of when the 'wake word' is used.
You'll notice nowhere did I say these fears were completely unfounded - just that there is no evidence to suggest this is occurring, and that if it were occurring, we would not be without ability to detect it. But by the same token, these selfsame fears, that an electronic device can be used to listen in on you, are 100% confirmed to be true with cellphones. We know that they can be used to listen in on you. Therefore, if your concerns are your electronics being used as a surveillance device, then cellphones are a clear and present risk and should not be owned.
And if we're throwing around fallacy accusations, and your argument is "We shouldn't have remotely accessible microphones and cameras around, because they'll be used as surveillance devices", then you're participating with a classic slippery slope fallacy - but I don't think all of the fallacy talk is particularly productive, either.
Feel free to replace the word 'you' with 'one', so read "If one were truly worried about spy devices, one should really consider dropping their cell phone in the toilet."
Other commenters have provided enough detail on what is currently a fact with cell phones microphones. Ignoring voice, your location (via GPS and/or cell tower), browsing and calling history, etc. etc. is recorded and transmitted to third parties constantly and not just google either, see http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34732514
> The traffic from the Echo has been studied extensively.
cool, got a link to those?
mainly out of interest reading about such systems and DSP, btw.
actual trust could only come from open source--"this closed source, auto-updating software hasn't been observed to send sensitive data over the network so far" is something I might as well take your word for :-)
Delayed response - My main uses are simple things like asking about the weather (current and future), listening to the flash briefing and asking random things while watching TV, asking what's on the family calendar. Had it hooked up to a smartthings hub for a bit, which worked, but the smartthings platform has issues so I've abandoned the idea of smart home control. Will buy a Philips Hue system in the next few weeks.
My wife, who hates gadgets in general, likes it in the kitchen to add stuff to her shopping list while cooking (with messy hands). In the store she opens the echo app and checks off everything on the list. It seems like a silly thing, but she thinks it's terrific and it has saved us many useless return trips to the store. She also loves the option to play music (again, for the same reason, messy hands or just busy).
My 7yo uses it for music, to get the answers to trivia and interact with a few 'skills' I've enabled (guess the animal, etc). She also "plays with Alexa" when friends come over (they take turns requesting songs and dancing)
The echo is not ideal, especially in terms of underlying knowledge base, integration with other Amazon devices (we have two firetv boxes, amazon owns IMDB, mysteriously neither are well-supported or integrated) and the "skills" approach is cumbersome (should have used an "intent" approach instead of "ask {skill}"), but voice recognition is better than anything I've used and it works for everyone in the family without training, as well as random guests, including kids.
PS I signed up early and bought it for $99, a second one was requested, but I feel the regular price of $179 is too high with the current feature set.
Note: It does NOT (yet) allow handsfree calling. I wish it did.
Same here. I keep checking the price hoping it drops to a level where I'd feel comfortable buying it just to play with one, but at $180, I think it's too steep when there's no real justification. Anything you'd really want the Echo for, you could do on your phone with an "OK Google" (or a few quick taps at worst).
Ever tried to call somebody while cooking? As a dad who spends most of his home time in the kitchen cooking and cleaning and parenting, hands-free tech is glorious.
I'd certainly have it in the kitchen, which happily is also in earshot of the living room, but despite doing a lot of cooking myself I've rarely needed to be entirely hands free. I do admittedly have a tablet screen that is absolutely filthy half the time, but its yet to come to any harm from it.
How does an outside observer know what is being recorded and stored (e.g. for later analysis or retrieval)? What guarantees does Amazon offer in their terms of service about their use of any recordings? Can the police get a warrant to have Amazon bug my home using my Echo?
I should clarify that there is a bit of artistic license on the title calling this a $10 Echo, there are 2 caveats;
Its only about $10 the CHIP is a "$9 Computer" plus tax & shipping etc. and this hack then requires a speaker, microphone and a button, however you may well have these lying around of have another device like an old speakerphone or something that you could gut and put the CHIP into as a new brain.
The other point is that its not really a full Echo, the Echo is a hardware appliance that implements Far Field Voice Technology, Wake Word Detection, A High Quality Bluetooth Speaker, Support for various media service (Prime Music, Audible, Pandora etc) and finally the Alexa Voice Assistant. This hack is really just access to the Alexa Voice Assistant without the wake word or far field tech.
So its about 90% of the functionality for a much lower price. Personally I have an Echo in my dining room which is great when walking around the house but I built this to use on my desk when I want to trigger home automation features without shouting downstairs.