Hacktoberfest: Use Alexa without talking!

Hacktoberfest: Use Alexa without talking!

Hacktoberfest is upon us! This month I’m hacking on small projects each week and sharing them.

Backstory

When we sleep at night, we like to have some background white noise to help with sleeping. Since we have an Echo in our kitchen and an Echo Dot in our bedroom, we ask it to “play rain sounds” which starts a lovely little piece of audio that puts us right to sleep . Unfortunately, it does not look and after an hour it stops. The sudden silence sometimes wakes me up, and I can’t restart it without talking to Alexa and potentially waking up my wife, and nobody wants that! So, I started researching how to talk to Alexa without talking to her and I came across this article on the DolphinAttack. This got me thinking about a device which could leverage this vulnerability, but quickly gave up as it involved more hardware than I wanted and there was a lot of setup. So, I kept researching and came across this forum which talked about a workaround! This seemed more promising and more similar to what I wanted.

The Goal

My goal for this week’s hackathon was to create a Slack Bot for talking to Alexa. The idea is that the Slack App received a text command to send to Alexa, converts the text to a speech audio file, then sends it to the device I want to receive it. This would let me send a text message to Alexa in the middle of the night without ruining my wife’s sleep!

The Backend

Thankfully, there is already an open source GitLab project for handling the audio file push and an article that shows how to use it! I started by manually proving the concept before moving forward. After this proof-of-concept seemed like it would work out, I started on a Dockerfile to set this baby up!

<br>
FROM alpine:latest<br>
ARG CLIENT_ID<br>
ARG CLIENT_SECRET<br>
ARG PRODUCT_TYPE_ID<br>
ENV CLIENT_ID $CLIENT_ID<br>
ENV CLIENT_SECRET $CLIENT_SECRET<br>
ENV PRODUCT_TYPE_ID $PRODUCT_TYPE_ID<br>
RUN mkdir -pv /opt/alexa<br>
WORKDIR /opt/alexa<br>
COPY *.sh ./<br>
RUN chmod +x *.sh<br>
RUN apk add --update ca-certificates \<br>
    espeak \<br>
    curl<br>
RUN (crontab -l ; echo "*/20 * * * * /opt/alexa/refresh_token.sh") | crontab -<br>

And a GitLab YAML file to auto-deploy it

<br>
stages:<br>
  - build<br>
  - deploy<br>
build-image:<br>
  stage: build<br>
  image: docker:latest<br>
  variables:<br>
    DOCKER_HOST: tcp://docker:2375/<br>
    DOCKER_DRIVER: overlay2<br>
  services:<br>
    - docker:dind<br>
  only:<br>
    - "master"<br>
  before_script:<br>
    - "docker login -u $CI_REGISTRY_USER -p $CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORD $CI_REGISTRY"<br>
  script:<br>
    - "docker build -t ${CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE}:${CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME} -t ${CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE}:latest --pull ."<br>
    - "docker push ${CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE}:${CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME}"<br>
    - "docker push ${CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE}:latest"<br>
  after_script:<br>
    - "docker logout ${CI_REGISTRY}"<br>
  tags:<br>
    - docker<br>
deploy-image:<br>
  stage: deploy<br>
  image: docker:latest<br>
  only:<br>
    - "master"<br>
  variables:<br>
    C_NAME: "alexa-bot"<br>
  before_script:<br>
    - "docker login -u $CI_REGISTRY_USER -p $CI_REGISTRY_PASSWORD $CI_REGISTRY"<br>
  script:<br>
    - "docker pull  ${CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE}:latest"<br>
    - "docker container stop -t 0 ${C_NAME} || true"<br>
    - "docker container rm ${C_NAME} || true"<br>
    - "docker run -d -P --name ${C_NAME} -e CLIENT_ID=${CLIENT_ID} -e CLIENT_SECRET=${CLIENT_SECRET} -e PRODUCT_TYPE_ID=${PRODUCT_TYPE_ID} --restart always ${CI_REGISTRY_IMAGE}:latest"<br>
  after_script:<br>
    - "docker logout ${CI_REGISTRY}"<br>
  tags:<br>
    - deploy<br>
 

TODO

Now that the image is published and the container running, we need to set up some sort of front-end. My major concern is security at this point, so I do still need to figure out that part. We don’t want random people accessing this API and submitting audio we can’t hear to control our device. It’ll probably be some client-server shared secret. I’ll go through some work on that part and make another post when it’s finished. Hackathons are meant to be down and dirty for an MVP. I at least have a container I can SSH into to issue commands now, so that’ll work for a little while to accomplish my goal. Ease of use via Slack would be the logical next step. Until next time!