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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> TL;DR: you need a smartphone to run Alexa.

Or Pebble Core :). Which seems to be intended to let you leave your smartphone at home when you go outside.

But I can't wait to use it as a companion. Google Now generally sucks, and the only way I found to make it usable is to hack it with Tasker. I don't mind carrying Core all the time, along with the smartphone.

(I just need to figure out how to keep it alive for the whole day with the 3G always on.)

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Core charges in two ways: power connector that attaches to the 3.5mm headphone jack, or via the attachable plate that allows wireless charging. Thus, you'll probably be able to attach a small external battery pack to make it run all day.

That said, I'm more interested in figuring out how to get offline speech recognition running on Core with something like PocketSphinx and only relying on the 3g connection when needed.

All this has got me thinking about what the smallest Android boards/devices out there are and how I could get a Raspberry Pi Zero connected to a cellular network. Need to do more research on this.

To build on that idea, you could use PocketSphinx for (battery-draining) always-on listening for a keyword, then sending the actual recording to a server for transcribing.

The Pebble watch can communicate with a smartphone, and uses voice-to-text for SMS responses. I imagine a similar implementation could be used for Alexa. The bigger hurtle may be the lack of speakers on the watch.

I have a Bluetooth headset bought specifically for the purpose of playing with voice assistants. Pebble Core will support Bluetooth, so I look forward to pairing them this way.

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