Home Automation with Amazon Echo and Ruby

My talk from Gotham Ruby Conference 2015! Thanks for coming :)

Transcript

1. Home Automation with Amazon Echo and Ruby Creating an API where there wasn't one to ameliorate first world problems @zachfeldman (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
2. $ whoami @zachfeldman Co-Founder/Chief Academic Officer New York Code + Design Academy nycda.com Classes on web development from basic to advanced, iOS development, and UI/UX design. (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
3. The Amazon Echo It has 7 microphones (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
4. Built-in functionality "Alexa, set an alarm for 45 seconds from now." "Alexa, where is the international space station?" "Alexa, play Sober by Childish Gambino." "Alexa, what's the forecast for tomorrow?" (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
5. What if we want to do more? (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
6. Desired Functionality "Alexa, add an event Breakfast at Tiffany's at 5:30 stop." "Alexa, tell the world Gotham Ruby Conference rocks stop." "Alexa, tell the world Jesse Chan Norris is the man stop." (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
7. How does this work? (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
8. The alexaho.me project Scraper Scrapes commands from Amazon Echo web app. Server Receives scraped commands, parses them. (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
9. Scraper ☞ Uses watir-webdriver to login to Amazon Echo web app ☞ When a new command is posted, sends command to alexaho.me Server application (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
10. What's in a Watir? "Watir (pronounced Water: I know it’s confusing) stands for Web Application Testing in Ruby, and the WebDriver part stands for, um, WebDriver." - watirwebdriver.com (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
11. But we're not using it for that ...and why couldn't you just use nokogiri like everyone else? (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
12. We're not just web scraping ☞ We're monitoring for ajaxComplete events ☞ This is kind of like a webhook, in a way (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
13. Let's see some code (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
14. Server ☞ Receives scraped commands from Amazon Echo ☞ Uses RegEx-powered parsing to match against key phrases ☞ Activates functionality if key phrases are matched, then further parses input ☞ Could be used with any plain-text input, not just from Echo (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
15. Server architecture First pass: require 'sinatra' get '/process' do if params[:q].scan(/turn on/) # do hue stuff end end (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
16. Things got more complicated ☞ How do we encourage open source contribution? ☞ Documentation ☞ Easily extensible, modular system (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
17. The Result (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
18. Imitation: the sincerest form of flattery While Bezos laughs on a yacht, alexaho.me was "first to market" with these now-native integrations... ☞ Hue ☞ Google Calendar (contributed) ...there's also an official API now. (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
19. One final demo "Alexa, get me a cab to Union Square, New York, New York stop." (c) 2015 @zachfeldman
20. More stuff at alexaho.me by @zachfeldman (c) 2015 @zachfeldman