I originally thought this blog post was going to be a lengthy explanation of how to install the Alexa software (found here) on the Raspberry Pi 3 with all of the caveats, tweaking, and reconfiguration necessary to get the software to install.  Any Linux user who frequently installs software from source knows that the time it takes to get some software to compile and install is exponentially proportional to the complexity of the code and the compile time.  This is not the case here.

It did take roughly an hour to run the automated install script provided in the Alexa repository, but once that had completed everything ran almost perfectly right out of the box.  I’m utterly floored by this, and am incredibly impressed with the Alexa development team on the quality of their software project.  So really, if this is something you’re interested in doing, use their guide to set up everything.  All you really need is a Raspberry Pi 3, a microphone (I used this one), and a speaker (I used one from Adafruit which I’ll discuss in detail in my post on wiring).  The only thing I had to tweak was forcing the audio to be output on the 3.5mm jack using raspi-config and selecting the jack in Advanced Options->Audio.

And without further ado, my working example.