Alexa Enabled IoT Device Simulation Using C# And AWS Lambda

Abstract

Purpose: Nowadays, device operation using voice commands is becoming popular. Several voice command services are available. Among them, Alexa from Amazon is the most popular. Almost Every day, vendors are integrating Alexa into their new products worldwide. We need physical devices for the device operation or understanding of the process flow of Alexa. Sometimes, physical devices are costly, or availability is poor. Here, we demonstrated how to create a simulated Alexa-enabled IoT device. We used several Amazon cloud services to execute the process flow. Alexa's skill is developed inside the Alexa developer console. To process the command, we use the AWS Lambda function. AWS IoT cloud service is used to trigger IoT devices over MQTT. For simulated devices, we are using a C# MQTT client. The researcher trying to simulate an Alexa-enabled device into their project can get some reference information from this work.

Design/Methodology/Approach: We create a graphical user interface (GUI) to interact with the user or display the device's status. The GUI is connected with the C# AWS IoT Device Shadow client. We created IoT Things in the AWS cloud. Under the IoT Shadow, we created a Device shadow. The Alexa service triggers the lambda function. The Lambda function updates the Shadow register, which resides inside the cloud.  The c# shadow client receives a notification when the device Shadow updates and updates the GUI element that represents the equipment. We can use any Alexa device to send voice commands, like the Alexa mobile app, Echo Dot, or Alexa PC app.

Findings/Result: Through this research work, we created and tested virtual devices that can be experiments or research work using Alexa voice commands. It has been tested for a long time. It performed well, and no issue was found. Using more code-level protection it can be robust for practical implementation.

Originality/Value: We found several fragmented documents over the web to implement Alexa-enabled virtual devices. After lots of study, we did practical and included the procedure in this research work. From voice input to load trigger, there are lots of steps involved. The complete guidance is not available easily. So through this research work, if someone follows, they can easily create a voice-operated device. This research work may add value to the researcher experimenting with the Alexa command-activated device.

Paper Type: Experimental-based Research.