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===== CONTROL OPENHAB ITEMS USING THE AMAZON ECHO =====
==== INTRODUCTION ====
Having a digital personal assistant, like Jarvis from Iron Man, is the ultimate geek dream.  Over the past few years, most of the major tech companies have attempted to turn this dream into reality.  Apple has Siri, Microsoft has Cortana, and Google has Google Now.  Even some smaller companies have tried their hand:  SoundHound recently launched their Hound app which focuses on natural language processing and a speedy response to your queries.  All of these companies have something in common, though.  They’re all focused on using your mobile phone as the input device.

Amazon has taken a different approach with their Echo “smart speaker”.  The Echo is a stylish, cylindrical speaker which is meant to be displayed on a coffee table, kitchen counter, or your nightstand.  However, the important part of Echo is what it’s doing: listening.  Simply speak the trigger word at any time (“Alexa” by default) to make the Echo spring to life and await your command.  That’s why it’s the perfect home automation controller.  It’s hands-free!

In this post, I’m going to show you how to control your OpenHAB items using the Amazon Echo.  Let’s begin! 
==== PREREQUISITES ====


First thing’s first.  Get your Echo all set up and decide where you’d like it to sit.  I played around with mine for about 15 minutes before I decided to get down to business and set it up with OpenHAB.

You’ll need to download a great little piece of software from GitHub named Amazon Echo HA Bridge.  The author, Armzilla, uses this to control a Vera from his/her Echo, but we’re going to use it to control OpenHAB.  Download the latest release to your OpenHAB PC.  I’m using version 0.1.2.  You’ll also need Java 8 installed in order to run the software.

Finally, we’ll need a Chrome extension named Postman.  We’ll use this to upload our settings into the Echo HA Bridge.  You may use another REST client if you wish, but I won’t cover that in this guide.

==== STEP 1: RUN THE AMAZON ECHO HA BRIDGE ====
Okay, enough beating around the bush.  Let’s get into it!  The first thing we need to do is run our Amazon Echo HA Bridge.  Open a command prompt window and navigate to the folder where you stored the Amazon Echo HA Bridge .jar file.  (Or use this shortcut! Navigate to the directory in Windows Explorer, then hold shift and right click in the white space.  Choose option “Open command window here”.  See below picture for an example!)\\