Smartbox brings the Amazon Echo to Grid 3

Amazon Echo for Grid 3

Amazon Echo is a hands-free speaker that you control with your voice. You can use it to hear the latest news, play your music, control your smart home devices and so much more.

Download the Amazon Echo grid set

Amazon Echo grid set

We’ve been working on a new grid set, so that you can speak to Alexa and control your Echo directly from your device.

The Amazon Echo grid set is designed to be easy to use and intuitive. There are a selection of ready-made grids available, providing access to music, audio books, radio, weather, jokes, alarms, and control of smart home devices such as lights, sockets and heating.

Explore the different categories of our Amazon Echo grid set in more detail here

The Echo challenge

We wanted to make Amazon Echo as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, so we set aside a day to create some grid set resources that will enable you to control Echo using Grid 3.

We started by exploring the things that Echo can do, and made lists of the necessary commands you would need to access these features. The next step was to build the grid set – breaking the commands down into categories and always giving the option for you to customise the grid and add in your own commands.

Editing the grid set

The grid set is very simple to edit – you can add and remove commands directly from inside each grid. You can see this in action, in the video below.

The grids are built using word lists, meaning that you can edit your commands and change the order they appear in from the Word list option in the Menu bar.

Controlling Echo

To control the echo you need to speak to ‘Alexa’, its voice. By simply saying “Alexa”, you will wake Echo and it will be ready to listen to your commands.

A number of the cells within the grid set have been pre-programmed to help you do just this, so you don’t need to type ‘Alexa’ before your command.

When you add a new radio station for example, the word list inside the radio grid has been built to say “Alexa, play” followed by the name of the station.

Similarly, if you want Alexa to play a particular song, select song from the music grid and use the keyboard to type in the name of the song. When you select the speak cell, Grid 3 will add “Alexa, play” followed by the name of the song you have chosen.

You can find out more about the Echo on Amazon’s website