Tuesday, September 19, 2017

You Can Talk to Alexa Over Slack Using Silent Echo

Silent Echo
Do you often feel like you don't want to talk to anyone, not even your Alexa? Though your handy virtual assistant Alexa is voice-activated now it gives you the option for chat. Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is one of the best digital assistants. But talking to Alexa all the time can be annoying sometimes. A Bot called ‘Silent Echo’ has been created by Bespoken. Bespoken is a company that offers tools for developing voice apps. It has released many open source commands line tools which have been adopted by nearly 700 voice app developers. It lets users interact with Alexa over Slack. The whole concept is that there are times when you want to chat with Alexa but you don't wish to yell out to it, then the chat option comes to the rescue. 

The Silent Echo boot has the text-to-speech property. It uses Amazon’s API to convert the text to audio which is then sent to Alexa and returns the audio output from Alexa as a text. It will even convert your text to audio if there is a lot of voice in the background. The new feature can be really useful in number of situations like Sometimes your room might be too noisy, in that case, your Alexa won't be able to hear you properly. Silent Echo is able to control home devices. But this new feature has a little disadvantage as it does not allow you to do all the things that Alexa do. That includes, unable to control music devices which mean you won't be able to control Spotify or any other music services, it will also unable to use Alexa skills. 


Due to the Security reasons, Silent Echo doesn't even allow you to do anything related to payment account which means you won't be able to order anything. Instead, you will be able to do all the daily chores like turn on or off lights, ask weather updates and things like that. It can also be used in group chats.  After installing silent Echo on slack, you can message Silent Echo bit or even call it up in a group chat by writing @silentecho. 

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