How to Empower the Amazon Echo with IFTTT

The Amazon Echo is a voice enabled speaker and personal assistant that has a range of capabilities which grow every day. As a developer who is fascinated by both the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence — the Echo holds so much potential!

The best way to begin experimenting with your own Echo customizations is via IFTTT (If This Then That), a service that allows rule based actions and triggers between a range of devices and services with no programming required. In this article, we will explore a few examples of functionality that the Echo can achieve when paired with IFTTT.

If you are in Australia — like me — and aren't quite sure how to get your hands on an Echo and set it up to work here, I have a quick guide on how to set up an Amazon Echo in Australia that I wrote at Dev Diner on this very topic! Whilst you can't get everything to work just yet, developers can get enough working that you'll be able to develop for the Echo in no time.

Completely New to IFTTT?

If you are completely new to IFTTT, we have a more generic overview of how it works in an earlier piece on Connecting LIFX Light Bulbs to the IoT Using IFTTT. We've also connected it to Node.js via the IFTTT Maker channel and WordPress via the IFTTT WordPress channel. Throughout this article, if you find any concepts in IFTTT a bit confusing, check the earlier articles — however I've aimed to structure this so that most readers can pick things up solely from this article.

Connecting Your Echo to IFTTT

To enable any of the below capabilities, we need to add the Amazon Alexa channel to IFTTT. Head to the Amazon Alexa page and click "Connect":

From here, you will be prompted to enter in your Amazon account details. Make sure you put in the account details for the account which your Echo is assigned to (if you have multiple accounts):

Agree to give IFTTT access to all of your Alexa information by clicking "Okay":

When you've granted it the right permissions, you'll be directed back to IFTTT and should see a "Channel Connected!" message:

From there, the steps for beginning a new recipe with the Echo are always the same, as the Echo is only a trigger in IFTTT — not an action. In other words, you can only use the Echo in IFTTT to cause actions to occur, you cannot get IFTTT to make the Echo speak back to you or look up information (I hold out hope that this will be a future addition!).

To create a new recipe, as always, you head to the top right hand corner and click your username. Then click "Create":

From there, search for the Amazon Alexa channel. It will also appear if you search for "echo", so you can find it in a range of ways!

From here, the trigger option chosen will differ depending on the recipe we want to create. Each recipe below will start from this point in the process.

Connecting the Echo to LIFX Light Bulbs

Whilst there is a LIFX skill you can install onto the Echo, it didn't work for me when I tried to use it. If you also have the same issue, you can use IFTTT to achieve the same results, just as we did within the Connecting LIFX Light Bulbs to the IoT Using IFTTT article here at SitePoint.

We want to trigger our lights via voice. To do this, we use the Echo trigger channels "Say a specific phrase" trigger:

From here, we set up which phrase we want to use. As an initial test, we can put down "turn on my light" and then click "Create Trigger" (note — your phrase needs to be all lowercase for it to be accepted):

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by Patrick Catanzariti via SitePoint