Gadgetory

buying an Alexa enabled speaker is not the only way that you can take the Amazon Alexa platform for a test-drive in fact if you have a Raspberry Pi a speaker and a microphone on hand you can actually make your own relatively easily hello as enticing as the DIY Alexa project may sound however there are some drawbacks here are five things you should consider before building your own Alexa speaker I know what you're thinking if you build your own Alexa speaker you can save a little bit of money that may be true if you have all the stuff already but if not that's not true at all the Amazon echo is a hundred and eighty dollars but you can now pick up a generation two echo dot for just fifty dollars if you want to build your own and you don't have any of the materials you're gonna have to pay $35 for the Raspberry Pi another ten for the power supply then you have to buy a speaker and a microphone and if you go with something like the matrix creator which is an add-on IOT dev board for the Raspberry Pi that's another 100 dollars and that's not even including the speaker now you could come out cheaper than this of course but these components are going to add up so it's not the cheapest route you're also sacrificing appearances the echo echo and Amazon tap are all pretty discreet devices they're designed to blend in amongst the things on a bookshelf or on your kitchen counter that's not exactly true of something like a Raspberry Pi if you're building your own Alexa speaker you're gonna have to build your own custom housing for it that doesn't interfere with the microphone and that's not always easy of course if you're like me you may find that the matrix creator and the Raspberry Pi look cool with exposed circuitry but that's not for everyone and you can't just hide it behind something because that will interfere with the microphones and it may not hear you but it also brings me to the next point not every third party or DIY Alexa speaker comes with a wake word if you're using many of the existing tutorials out there they're not updated to incorporate the latest API update from Amazon which includes support for awake word so instead if you use something like the matrix creator you have to wave your hand over the IR sensor to activate it to tell Alexa to listen and many of the tutorials out there incorporate a button press a switch or something else in lieu of the wake word and what that means is if you're not in arm's reach of the Raspberry Pi or the DIY speaker have to move over to it to wake it up to speak to it which kind of defeats the purpose then you have the issue of response time the official Alexis speakers tend to get back to you pretty quickly within one to two seconds depending on your connection speed but the DIY option that I've been using for almost four days now is not so snappy Alexa what's the weather in Charlotte it's 63 degrees with mostly sunny skies today's forecast calls for more currently and Shawn 63 is agree mostly nice guys all of this is assuming that everything goes to plan you're not dealing with the same reliability as you would if you went with an official Alexa speaker if you go with a DIY build the matrix creator which explicitly states that it's a LexA project is for demonstration purposes only is hit or miss one time you'll boot it up and a work flawlessly the next time not so much if you don't want to have to go through the trouble of building your own Alexa speaker you can actually test it out in your browser or by downloading one of the third-party apps for Android or iOS but I still think this project is well worth the time and the effort if you have the components on hand already you don't have to spend any money it's a great way to see how Alexa might fit into your home without spending a dime and hearing a Raspberry Pi say hello and Alexis voice for the very first time makes all the trouble worth it