control PC using alexa - alexa

I have got a requirement of controlling PC/Computer using Alexa skill, i.e if I want to open an excel file on PC then if I simply say Alexa, ask openexcel to open excel file then excel file should be opened.
Can someone please guide me on how to proceed on this requirement.
Thanks
Varun

Short overview:
You need a webserver on your local machine to answer Alexa's requests (I'd suggest Python's simplehttpserver)
Have the handlers on your webserver control Excel or whatever you need to do (that depends a lot on your os, you didn't mention which you use).
You need an SSL endpoint to your local webserver (the easy solution is to run ngrok, check ngrok.com

Related

Intercept voice commands on Google Assistant or Alexa

I'm planning on doing an experiment, where we will setup a Google Assistant or Alexa device and see how people would interact with voice assistants in a certain environment. It's basically a Wizard of Oz experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment). Is it possible to intercept the voice commands before they get passed to the Assistant or Alexa? This could help me decide/manage if I want to handle the user input or let Google/Alexa handle it.
Will you be using a purchased "original" device or will you use, e.g. an Raspberry PI and build it yourself?
For the former this won't be possible out of the bow. However, I recently stumbled upon an article. It describes a new device which would achieve something that might help you: It allows you to "reprogram" the activation word for Alexa and Google Assistant. The article mentions that the device's hardware is a Raspberry PI. So, I guess you could build something similar yourself. That was also the first idea that came into my mind.
I would imagine something like this:
On your raspberry you have a script (I guess written in python would be easiest) that listens for the wake-word, e.g. "Alexa" and also records the following voice. However, you have Alexa itself not running for now, so it doesn't get triggered. Your script also includes a logic for when to pass the command on to Alexa or what to do with it instead. When it decides that the command is to be passed on, the script starts Alexa and replays the recording. Thus, triggering it the same way the users would have triggered it, in the first place.
Another idea would be to use two microphones. One for your script and one for Alexa. Your script having the ability to mute/unmute those.
Pleas take into account that those are just spontaneous ideas. It's completely possible that I've missed something and this wouldn't work. But until somebody who has done this before comes up, I'd give it a try!

Cache Outgoing Data from browser

This might be a very broad question. But this is what i want. I open a website and enter some details in the website like my credentials to login or it may be any data that pass from my browser to the website. Now what i want is that i should cache ( write to a temp file ) whatever that i send to that website. How can this be done? I tried to extract the data present in the packets that are flowing out of my machine but i find only junk characters in that (may be header). any ideas are welcomed. I am using Ubuntu Linux and would like to achieve this using shell script/C/C++
One option would be to use the Fiddler Web Debugger which is scriptable (C#).
Although it's a Win32 program, it can act as a proxy for any Linux machine. See Debug traffic from another machine (even a Mac or Unix box) for details.
There's also a native Linux app called dsniff which can be used to log all HTTP traffic to a file.

Simple file transfer

I want to create an application in C that allows two users to share a file. I'll call the person sending the file the server and the receiver the client. There are a few requirements:
The users need no identification, no "login". You could say they are unknown for my application.
The server selects a file for transfer and gets returned a simple ~10 character ID string/hash that the client can use to retrieve the file.
The same application is used for both serving and receiving.
My application must not need dedicated software running on a remote server, unless it's freely available (e.g. bittorrent trackers).
Now this sounds a lot like bittorrent and I am seriously thinking of doing this through bittorrent. I'm not sure how I would do this. Are there any good libraries for torrent creation / seeding / downloading?
Please answer this question by either:
Posing a viable alternative for bittorrent / other ideas.
Posting good libraries / snippets / implementations of the bittorrent protocol in C.
This does indeed sound like something best done with BitTorrent. Have you had a look at libbt? It's not very well documented but does include a sample client, which is btget.c in /src/.
I have now found this library: rasterbar libtorrent. It's in C++ but I don't mind (I don't know either that well anyway).
Sharing here for future reference if other people are looking for the same thing as me.
And an other solution, send the file through an IRC server (like Freenode). I came up with this solution after I had trouble with opening ports with bittorrent.

Remote Desktop Project in C

I want to make project for my final year in college.
So someone suggested me to make Remote Desktop in C.
Now I know basic socket functions for windows in C i.e. I know how to make
echo server in C.
But I don't know what to do next. I searched on internet but couldn't find
something informative.
Could someone suggest me how to approach from this point..any tutorial...or any source ?
I think this is do-able. For a college project, you don't need to have something as complex and as full-featured as VNC. Even demonstrating simple keyboard and mouse control and screen feedback would be enough, in my opinion, and that's well within reach.
If you're doing everything from scratch and using Win32, you can get the remote screen using the regular "printscreen" example all around the internet.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cpp/Screen_Capture__Win32_.aspx has it, for one. You can then compress the image with a third-party library, or just send it raw; this wouldn't be very efficient but it would still be a viable demonstration.
Apart from capturing the screen data remotely and showing it in the local window, you'll need to listen for local window messages for mouse and keyboard events, send them to the remote host, and then play them back. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms646310%28VS.85%29.aspx will probably do that for you.
Check tightvnc TightVNC is a free remote control software package. The source code is also available.
For sending the image of the screen I would probably use rtp. The JRTPLIB is really handy for that.
And yes, as KevinDTimm says, an echo server is the very easiest part.
KevinDTimm may well be right, writing an RDP client would a fairly significant undertaking. To give you some idea, the current spec, available at the top of this page, is 419 pages long and includes references to several additional documents for specific aspects of RDP like Audio Redirection and Clipboards.

Database query representation impersonating file on Windows share?

Is there any way to have something that looks just like a file on a Windows file share, but is really a resource served up over HTTP?
For context, I'm working with an old app that can only deal with files on a Windows file share, I want to create a simple HTTP-based service to serve the content of the files dynamically to pick up real time changes to the underlying data on request.
WebDAV (basically) takes an existing directory, and shares it over HTTP - which sounds like the opposite of what you want.
You need something that speaks SMB/CIFS on one end, and your own code on the other. The easiest way to do that is with a userspace file system.
To that end, here's a couple of links:
WinFUSE, which is kind of a barebones CIFS/SMB server that can host your own filesystem. I've done a couple of small samples with it - and the docs are terrible, but it more or less worked.
Dokan, a userspace file driver with .NET bindings. I haven't used this one, but it looks promising. It has both .NET and Ruby bindings, so you should be able to get a POC up pretty quickly.
Callback File System - yet another userspace file system. Again, I have no experience with this one.
A Linux box with SAMBA and FUSE that shares the drive out to the Windows box.
This won't answer your question in any meaningful way, but maybe it will get you pointed in the right direction. Look into serving the "file(s)" via WebDAV--SharePoint uses this and its files can be accessed exactly as you want, as a file share where the transport mechanism is HTTP. Unfortunately I can't give any more detailed info, as I've only worked on the client end of WebDAV and not the server side of things.
I think serving up files from WebDAV might be what you're looking for.

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