Awesome Amazon Echo Hack Enables Alexa To Serve As Tesla Model S Valet
Teslas are pretty darn adept at pulling into and out of tight parking spaces and garages all own their own through a feature called Summon, but what's really cool is combining the auto-park function with Amazon's smart Echo speaker. That's exactly what developer and cloud connected platforms advocate Jason Goecke did over the weekend.
As a result of Goecke's "fun weekend project," he can now ask Alexa to pull his Tesla Model S out of or into his garage. To make the magic happen, he concocted an awesomesauce recipe consisting of smart technologies, cloud tools, and good old fashioned programming, albeit his hack uses "very little code."
"I am using the Amazon Echo’s Alex Skill Kit to trigger on a keyword (‘ask KITT’) and send the resulting event to AWS Lambda. Lambda then executes my code (I built my Lambda function with Apex, which I highly recommend for anyone working with Lambda) where I use the Tesla Golang library I recently published. The Golang code on Lambda then calls the unofficial Tesla API which in turns triggers the car to take action," Goecke explains.
The action Goecke refers to is twofold. First Alexa taps into Homelink to open the garage door, then it calls on Tesla's Summon function to have the Model S automatically pull itself out of the garage (or back in, as the case might be).
Though Goecke did this for fun in his spare time, there's a serious agenda behind it. Goecke would like to see Elon Musk and company work closer with the developer community by releasing an open API.
Tesla has built the beginnings of an excellent platform, but it will take a concerted effort to attract developers to build the apps that even Elon Musk hasn’t dreamed of (yet)," Goecke concludes.
