An Amazon Echo application (a.k.a. 'Skill') which provides tight integration with your Home Automation. Alexa-HA delivers natural voice control and verbal feedback for practically anything in your home, and beyond. The key feature highlights include:
- Switch devices/appliances/lights/etc
- Set light colors individually, by room or group
- Control light dimmer levels individually, by room or group
- Set thermostat target temperatures
- Change between various scenes/modes (i.e. home/lighting/security/etc)
- Get current states (i.e. temperature/humidity/luminance, power consumption, etc)
- Trigger custom server side rules and return a response which is spoken by the Echo (i.e. say 'watch a movie' automatically sets up your Home Theater by powering on the Projector/AV Receiver/HTPC, lowering the Projector Screen, dimming the lights, etc.)
- Research virtually anything via voice through Wolfram Alpha API
- Display customized 'cards' in the Alexa App
- Automatically generates the Skill 'utterances' based on configured devices/rooms
- Crude support for Text-To-Speech 'announcements' by pairing the Echo with your HA server over Bluetooth
The current version is focused on perfecting Alexa support for OpenHAB. Other HA solutions may be added in the future.
Alexa-HA's technology stack is primarily comprised of the following key open source projects:
- node.js - evented I/O for the backend
- alexa-app - A Node.js module to simplify creation of Alexa (Amazon Echo) apps (Skills) using Node.js
- alexa-app-server - A web server module for Alexa (Amazon Echo) apps (Skills)
- express.js - fast Node.js network app framework
- request - A Node.js module for making http requests
Your HA Controller does the heavy lifting of integrating with various downstream technlologies/protocols, and Echo combined with the Alexa-HA Skill translates your voice commands into HA actions.
Alexa-HA leverages the Alexa Skills Kit to communicate with your internal HA server. The Skill can be deployed in numerous ways, including:
- Semi-direct (i.e. Echo -> AWS ASK -> NodeJS/Express -> HA)
- Proxied through a webserver (i.e. Echo -> AWS ASK -> Apache/Nginx -> NodeJS -> HA)
- In-cloud via AWS Lambda micro services (i.e. Echo -> AWS ASK -> AWS Lambda -> HA)
We prefer the second option of self-hosting a webserver and NodeJS application on the same network as your HA server/appliance, which proxies most of the communication internally for improved security and control. In all cases end-to-end SSL encryption is required through proper trusted CA's or self signed certificates. Between the SSL transport encrypt, custom application checks that confirm the requestors AWS ASK applicationId and userId match the configuration, as well as tracking all requestIds for audit trails, strong security is enforced. This ensures you and only your Echo(s) can issue commands to your HA controller.
Note that due to the Amazon Echo/Alexa architecture it is NOT possible to keep everything on your local network - the voice processing must be conducted in the cloud, and you are required to setup port forwarding on your firewall to allow AWS access to an internally hosted service. The AWS ASK service then issues commands to your HA controller through your public facing endpoint.
Currently you cannot simply install Alexa-HA through the Alexa App store, rather its required to setup your own Skill through the Amazon Developer Portal. In some ways this is advantageous as you can better customize the skill to your homes layout, desired scenes, and controllable devices. You can also personalize the skill 'Invocation Name'. To get started with configuring your own Alexa-HA skill, see:
1.0 (02/29/2016) - Initial public release!
- Automatic device discovery
- Intelligent reprompting and interactions (i.e. 'which room did you mean?')
- Timer support (i.e. 'turn off my bedroom lights in 30 minutes)
- AWS Lambda support - eliminating the complexities of provisioning servers/services/SSL certificates/etc
- HA 'switch' to turn the Echo request handling ON/OFF (i.e. when the house is in 'away mode', disable Echo request handling altogether)
- Possibly publish an official Alexa App and Alexa-HA Web Portal for managing credentials, configuring the item/room mappings, and setting up your HA server access info
We need your help!
Want to help with development? Excellent! Fork the project on GitHub and/or submit pull requests...
Don't have an Amazon Echo or your Home Automation setup yet? It is possible to test, experiment and further develop Skills using EchoSim and OpenHAB running in demo mode. (which needs tested!)
You can also contribute by thinking up new ways to interact with your home in general through voice commands. We are very interested in expanding this project to make it as easy and intuitive for anyone to use. Please create tickets in our github issue tracker for any desired features, and include a description of the use case...
Countless hours have been put into development and refinement of this open source project so far. We need your support! Any and all donations via PayPal are very much appreciated. Donations will be used to fund further development and add support for additional HA controllers/products.
- Write unit tests
- Improve error handling/logging
- Rethink and expand the ASK 'slots' and 'utterances'