Otto

What if you could be in control of when your Echo listens or not?

You could be forgiven for wondering if the AI-powered apocalypse was on its way, especially after Alexa’s unprompted, creepy laughter, and the timeAmazon Echo sent out a recording of a couple’s conversation,

That kind of behaviour certainly put a lot of people on edge.

In fact, the innocent age where we simply trusted products right out of the box is over. That’s why we thought of a way to give users direct control of their voice assistant.

Otto is a privacy-friendly add-on which sits on top of your Amazon Echo. It keeps the Echo microphone in mute, preventing it from listening until you want to use it.

By saying “Hey Otto” — or setting it up to respond to any other name — the device acts on the Echo buttons, freeing Alexa to attend to your every need. Once it’s responded, Otto puts the Echo back to the muted state until the next time.

The Echo has two physical buttons on its top, one to mute/unmute the device and another to activate the voice assistant without having to say “Alexa”. Otto consists of a speech recognition chip that can be trained to detect any word. Every time the chip recognises the word “Hey Otto”, it activates two solenoids that press the two buttons, to make the Echo ready to respond to commands instantly. Once the Echo has responded, the solenoids activate again to put the Echo back to mute.