Adding Alexa Voice Control to any Arduino Project

This use case shows you how easy it is to integrate Amazon’s Alexa into your Arduino Cloud, thereby giving you full, natural-language voice control for any and all connected projects.

The challenge

Voice control using natural-language processing is quite commonplace, but that doesn’t make it a simple function to build. Indeed, it’s one of the most complex, commercially available computing tasks in the world. Building it into a maker project is an equally difficult task.

This type of naturalistic control is highly appealing to makers, adding a whole new level of possibilities to home automation, robotics, entertainment and many other types of projects. These same makers, however, are part of the Arduino community because they have a preference for building their own equipment. Therefore, off-the-shelf equipment solutions such as Amazon’s Alexa range of devices isn’t what they’re looking for.

The challenge is to incorporate the same quality of voice control and language understanding exhibited by the Alexa platform into DIY electronics projects. This integration would typically be highly complex, or prohibitively restricted due to the processing power available on microcontroller devices such as Arduino, ESP32 or ESP8266.

The solution

Amazon, as well as similar product manufacturers such as Google, have provided an API for their natural language processing platforms. This gives third parties such as Arduino a way to harness the abilities of the Alexa system and deliver those features to DIY projects, electronics enthusiasts and makers via Arduino Cloud.

The Arduino Cloud is the quickest, easiest way to build and control a connected project. Cross platform device-to-device communication has become massively simplified through the use of shared, synched Cloud variables. Devices of all kinds can work together seamlessly without the need for any complex communication systems or coding.