-
Alexa Has Finally Been Hacked into a Singing Fish Robot
If you know the internet, you know it was only a matter of time. Alexa, the brains behind the Amazon Echo smart assistant, has been ripped from her cylindrical body and placed into that of a Big Mouth Billy Bass with hilarious results. For those too young to remember, Big Mouth Billy Bass is a relic of the ’90s that used to sing a variety of songs when unwitting victims passed by. Now, thanks to developer Brian Kane, Alexa the Largemouth Bass is now a reality.
This comes on the heels of Amazon releasing Alexa’s API to developers, allowing her to take all sorts of unique new shapes. In other words, expect to see Alexa’s voice coming from a wide variety of hilarious new forms in the near future. An API, or application programming interface, is a sort of tool released by web and software companies so that others can implement their services in different ways. This means that, while it is hilarious to see, Kane’s little project also has some pretty amazing implications. Imagine being able to put Alexa in charge of your car or put it into a mobile robot.This isn’t the work of a hobbyist, however. Brian Kane is a teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design and created the Alexa-Billy Bass hybrid to show students how to prototype something and make it reality quickly. The school hopes to rival technological giant MIT, and this small project was to draw attention to RISD and its endeavors. He created this techno logical Frankenstein with something known as Arduino, an open-source software platform.