Amazon Echo cabinet integration

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

As sparked by a discussion in an unrelated thread, I'm contemplating ways to integrate Alexa control of an arcade cabinet or RetroPie setup. Turning a cabinet on or off via Alexa is fairly straight forward if the device can handle being directly unplugged, slightly more complicated if we're looking to do soft on/off, but still doable with off-the-shelf components.

What I'm envisioning is directly launching a game by voice. The purpose being that while typically a front-end is going to have a short-list of games, you might have some large number of other titles available in an 'all games' category or some such which would be quicker to launch by naming the game rather than scrolling through a long list.  Numerous times I've had a guest ask "Yes, but can it play X?" to which the answer is "Yes, but..."

At the moment I'm thinking this is accomplished by running something like NodeRED (https://flows.nodered.org) somewhere on the network, and then a plugin on whichever front end which accepts commands over the network, generated by NodeRED.

[ark_ader]

Very interested, but should this topic be moved to the software sub forum?   

[Howard_Casto]

I need to look into the sdk for alexa.  A lesser known feature is that you can directly control an xbox one with her.  Couple that with the windows 10 xbox one streaming app and games installed to the hdd and you can power on the xbox and stream a specific game directly to your cab with a simple voice command.  Of course I'd like to make it even friendlier and make a command line app for frontend use, but I haven't looked into how possible that is yet.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

Here's another resource I had previously not heard of until now:
http://docs.kitt.ai/snowboy/#introduction

So now we can set a wake word of screaming "MORTAL KOMBAT" and have it automatically launch. I think that alone is worth it.

[DrakeTungsten]

I don't use any kind of rom management tools. Is there already something out there which can be used for mapping, say, the human-friendly phrase "Marvel Super Heroes" to the Rom name msh?

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

When you use MAME to generate a mame.xml file, it already contains human-readable titles alongside rom information. That gets used fairly often by various front-ends to control what gets displayed.

[Howard_Casto]

The only problem is mame has so many garbage roms in it now that it takes forever to parse the frikkin xml and then you are going to need some filters weed out the junk.  The new GameEx has some pretty good filters based on an explanation I gave ages ago of how awkward it is to parse mame now.  There's also the all killer no filler list. 

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

I was wondering if an online scraper service could be used to 'sanitize' the game name to a rom file.