2017 2nd International Conference on Frontiers of Sensors Technologies
Voice Activated Smart Home Design and Implementation
Chan Zhen Yue
School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore
e-mail: zchan012@e.ntu.edu.sg
Abstract—For over more than a decade, smart systems have
played an important part in human daily life. With the use of
modern technologies, smart sensors, processors and phones,
the present smart home systems enhance distributed
entertainment, household control, home energy monitoring,
home security and surveillance. The services provided include
voice controlled alarms, personalized calendars with weather
forecast, and news report reminders. This paper presents an
overall design for low-cost, micro-processor based smart home
system designed for hall residents of Nanyang Technological
University (as the main beneficiary). It aims to improve their
academic performance by providing a better quality of living.
The system can also be operated as a computer and supports
integration with various sensors through its General-purpose
Input / Output pins (GPIO). Users can customize their needs
through this system. The presented system integrates
household appliance control, entertainment system, hall
facilities monitoring and home security. It is controlled via
Telegram on smart phones and Alexa Voice Service (AVS) and
Amazon Developer Console supported by Amazon.
Keywords-raspberry Pi; Python; smart home; Telegram;
Alexa; Alexa skill sets
I. INTRODUCTION
Home automation is an act of using devices and
programming through a network to control home functions
for a better quality of life. It reduces human interactions as
much as technically possible and replaces them with
programmed electronic systems. Smart home has been a
developmental focus for global technology corporates such
as Google and Amazon. By 2022, global smart home market
is expected to reach USD 121.73 Billion, a huge growth
from USD 46.97 Billion in 2015 [1]. The most common
features of the smart home systems in the market comprise
household control, smart room, security, surveillance,
entertainment system, energy saving and healthcare.
Generally, most of the smart home systems make use of
wireless technology such as internet, radio frequency and
Bluetooth as means of communication between the
controllers and receivers. Users are able to send commands
and control the smart home systems via computers,
smartphones and pre-built programming codes. Various
Android and iOS based mobile applications are developed to
improve the user experience.
Today, with the introduction of Google Home and
Amazon Echo, voice controlled smart home system has
978-1-5090-4860-1/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Shum Ping
Director, Centre for Optical Fibre Technology
Nanyang Technological University
Singapore
e-mail: epshum@ntu.edu.sg
become the latest trend in this field. Various devices
including Philips Hue, Samsung Smart Thing, WeMo and
Ecobee are also developed to work with the above-
mentioned smart home system. The main advantage of using
voice recognition in smart home system is to reduce the
effort of using smartphone and the need of developing a
mobile application. On the other hand, users especially the
elderly can save the time spent familiarizing with the
dynamic operating technologies. People with disabilities also
have access to use the smart home system.
The aim of this paper is to design and implement a
quality home assistant which can control by both voice and
text commands. Voice commands are captured by Amazon
Voice Service (AVS), also known as Alexa. It is then
processed by Amazon Developer Console, Alexa Skill Sets
and Ngrok service before reaching the control terminal, a
Raspberry Pi. User can access and manage these services via
Amazon Developer Console.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
The basic idea of a smart home system is to control and
monitor household appliance wirelessly and verbally.
Amruta S Et Al. [2] proposed a computer based wireless
smart home system. The proposed system consists of an
automatic speech recognition system which identifies the
spoken words and translates them into text command in
MATLAB. The text command will be transmitted to a
microcontroller via a low-powered RF ZigBee based remote
control system. The microcontroller controls the household
electrical appliances via its corresponding relays.
Sonali Sen Et Al. [3] proposed another voice controlled
smart home project. It was implemented with an Android
based smartphone, an Arduino UNO, a Bluetooth module
and relays which are connected to the household appliances.
The Speech to Text service (STT) is implemented by the
built-in Android voice recognizer, and the Bluetooth module
transmits the text command to the serial ports of Arduino
UNO. Based on the text commands to the General-Purpose
Input / Output (GPIO) pins, the relays are set to ON or OFF
accordingly.
III. PROPOSED SYSTEM
The proposed system utilizes the services provided by
Amazon, which is capable of capturing voice commands and
processing them. The command will be sent to a local
webserver created by Raspberry Pi microprocessor. This

connection service is provided by Ngrok by generating a
secured public Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Upon
receiving the commands, the Raspberry Pi will execute the
control of its GPIO pins with the written Python scripts.
Users can control the smart home system via the microphone
attached to the Raspberry Pi, Amazon Reverb mobile app
installed on any smart phones or text commands via
Telegram app.
Figure 1. Block Diagram of the System.
The key components of this voice activated smart home are:
x Raspberry Pi 3 Model B
x Alexa Skill Kits / Amazon Developer Console
x Ngrok Service
x Electronics Components and Sensors
x Reverb Smartphone Application
x Telegram Smartphone Application
A. Raspberry Pi 3 Model B
Figure 2. Schematic Raspberry Pi 3 Model B front.
The Raspberry Pi is a credit card size microcomputer. It
is the brain of the entire smart home system, capable of
processing programming codes and controlling a huge
number of devices via its GPIO pins. For specifications, the
Raspberry Pi processes at 1.2GHz with a Broadcom
BCM2837 64bit ARMv7 Quad Core Processor. It has 40
GPIO pins, 4 USB ports, a full size HDMI port, micro-SD
port, and is powered by a micro USB power source [4]. For
its wireless communication, the Raspberry Pi has both WiFi
and Bluetooth module on board. Once the Raspberry Pi is
connected to a monitor, a mouse and a keyboard, it is ready

to be programmed. Raspberry Pi can also be connected and
controlled by a smartphone or computer via the Secure Shell
(SSH). Created by Simon Tatham, PuTTY is one of the free
SSH clients for Windows platform [5] and it is used in this
project. In short, the Raspberry Pi takes input from the
processed voice commands and various sensors, processes
them with the written Python codes and executes the
corresponding commands specified by the codes. Figure 2
shows the front schematic of a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.
B. Alexa Skill Kits / Amazon Developer Console
The Amazon Voice Service, also known as Alexa, is not
only the core of the voice recognition function in this smart
home system, but also the brain of millions of devices
including Amazon Echo – the smart home device developed
by Amazon. The proposed smart home system uses Amazon
Voice Service as its voice recognition system due to its user-
friendliness and the cost of prototyping. The free tier account
is usually sufficient for development purpose. Application
Program Interfaces (APIs) are created via the Alexa Skill
Kits (ASK), where the voice commands are defined and
processed before sending them to a local server hosted by the
Raspberry Pi. Figure 3 shows the architecture of Alexa Skill
Kits [6].
Figure 3. Architecture of Alexa Skill Kits.
C. Ngrok Service
Ngrok is an efficient tool for developers to test their
webworks, localhost and APIs. By creating a secure public
URL, it allows local hosts and machines to connect to the
internet, behind the firewalls [7]. In this project, Ngrok
generates a public URL and it is used by Amazon Developer
Console as a mean of communication with the Raspberry Pi.
The most significant advantage of using Ngrok is its swift
response speed. The average time taken for the voice
command to be processed in this smart home system is 1 to 2
seconds. Figure 4 shows the terminal of Ngrok displaying
the public URL while Figure 5 shows Amazon Developer
Console interface where the Ngrok URL is requested.
Figure 4. Ngrok Terminal Showing the Public URL.
 connected to the Raspberry Pi as a microphone. The
hardware prototype is shown in Figure 7 below.

Figure 5. Amazon Developer Console Service Endpoint Section.

D. Electronics Components and Sensor

In this project, an RGB Light Emitting Diode (LED) strip
and Radio Frequency (RF) controlled sockets are used as a
representation of a household electrical appliances control.
Whenever the user gives voice command such as “Alexa, tell
Pi to turn on my red lights”, the LED strip will turn red
within seconds. On the other hand, when the Raspberry Pi
receives a command to switch off an electrical appliance,
such as a fan, a radio frequency pattern will be generated by
Raspberry Pi through a 433MHz RF transceiver to the RF
controlled socket and turn it off. As for security feature, a
magnetic reed switch is installed on the door. Once the
security feature is activated by the user, e.g. “Alexa, tell Pi to
secure my room”, the door will be in secured mode and the
user will be alerted through a push notification if the door
opens.
E. Reverb Smartphone Application
Reverb allows users to access the Alexa Voice Service
from anywhere, and is useful when the nearest microphone
does not receive voice command clearly. By tapping the
microphone icon on Reverb, Alexa is ready to receive voice
commands.
F. Telegram Smartphone Application
Telegram allows user to control the smart home system
by sending text commands directly to the Raspberry Pi. The
Bot API in Telegram is capable of providing text responses
which are defined in the scripts. Figure 6 shows the smart
home control interface via Telegram.
Figure 7. Hardware Prototype of the Smart Home Sytem.
The implementation will be divided into 2 parts: Alexa
Voice Service and Raspberry Pi Controls. The results will be
shown later.
A. Alexa Voice Service Implementation
In the Amazon Developer Console, intents must be
created and defined before a voice command can be
understood by Alexa. In this smart home system, three
intents are created, namely Control, Module and Detail.
Custom slot types can be referenced by these intents
according to their functions. Figure 8 shows the custom slot
types which are used in this smart home system.
Figure 8. Custom Slot Types and their Referenced Intents
With the intents and custom slot types, sample utterances
can be created to invoke the intents. For example, utterance
“GPIOControlIntent to {status} the {detail} {module}” will
invoke the specified intent if the user gives a voice command
like “Alexa, tell Pi to {on} the {blue} {lights}”. More
utterance samples can be created so that Alexa will have
better accuracy in understanding more voice commands of
different structures. Figure 9 shows the list of utterance
samples used in this smart home system.

Figure 6. Text Command and Responses via Telegram

IV. IMPLEMENTATION AND RESULTS

The proposed smart home system is implemented in a
mini-room created by a box and breadboard. A headset is Figure 9. List of Utterance Samples Used in this Project


B. Raspberry Pi Control Implementation
A main python script is written in Raspberry Pi to
execute the commands processed by Alexa Voice Service.
This script is running all the time to capture any commands
sent. Individual features such as music videos control, LED
color control and security are written in separate Python
codes and they are called in this main script using
Subprocess method. Figure 10 shows part of the main
Python script to execute the music videos control and
security features. The voice response of Alexa is written in
the return statement line.
Figure 10. Main Python Script in Raspberry Pi
C. Results
Once the main Python script is being executed and Ngrok
is online (connected to Amazon Developer Console), Alexa
is ready to work. The smart home system can be tested via
the “Test” function in the console to ensure that the system is
fully operational. Figure 11 shows the service request and
positive response from the test function.
Upon testing, the smart home system functioned as
expected and responded to commands within a few seconds.
The return statements delivered by Alexa were loud and
clear. Also, this smart home system worked perfectly on both
Reverb and Telegram.
Figure 11. Service Request and Response from Test Function

V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS
In the near future, smart home system will be essential to
everyone with the ever-improving Google Home and
Amazon Echo. This paper presented the design and
implementation of a low-cost voice activated smart home
system which can be integrated with many basic subsystems
and tailored to personal needs. With the Alexa Skill Kits and
Raspberry Pi, every appliance can be controlled from
anywhere without direct interaction with them. There is full
of potential in developing the simple and user-friendly Alexa
Skill Kits and the Amazon Web Services. Future works can
be done on upgrading the smart home system to cater to a
larger number of users, e.g. smart classrooms and smart
schools. One can also consider developing a smart healthcare
system for the elderly to alert their next of kin should Alexa
receive no responses from the user for a long period of time,
or a requested help.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We wish to acknowledge the funding for this project
from Nanyang Technological University under the
Undergraduate Research Experience on CAmpus (URECA)
programme.
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