Sure, you can have Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa speak to you through an Echo, but why not have it respond to commands from the mouth of a wall-mounted singing fish?
Developer Brian Kane hacked Alexa to speak through the mouth of Billy Big Mouth Bass, a singing, robotic fish, the kind usually seen mounted on the wall of a gas station store or your uncle’s basement man cave. Because that’s not the kind of thing you keep to yourself, he posted the delightful/terrifying results on Facebook, titling it simply, “the future.”
Though we don’t know exactly how he accomplished such a feat, The Verge notes that it’s likely related to the Alexa API, which was opened in April and allows developers to embed the assistant in third-party hardware. Who’s to say that third-party hardware can’t be a robotic singing fish? No one.
It’s unlikely that Alexa will start crooning “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” when the fish’s motion sensor is activated, however, as The Verge notes that Billy doesn’t have a built-in microphone, so there must be an offboard mic elsewhere.
