Amazon reveals how to build an Echo speaker with the Raspberry Pi

Amazon wants to push its Alexa voice assistant as far and wide as possible, so much so that one of the company's employees has released a step-by-step guide to building an Alexa-powered speaker yourself with a Raspberry Pi. The do-it-yourself Echo can be made with a $40 Raspberry Pi Model 2, a USB microphone, and a handful of other cheap components.

The guide was put together and posted to GitHub by Amit Jotwani, Amazon's senior evangelist for Alexa. Jotwani's job involves helping developers — and apparently tinkerers too —  bake the company's voice service into third-party products. It may be a response to a similar Raspberry Pi-powered Echo guide posted by YouTube page Novaspirit Tech earlier this month.

The approach requires some minor coding experience, but it will net you a functioning Alexa speaker for a fraction of the price. The Echo is on sale now for $180, while the newly released and smaller $130 Echo Tap starts shipping on March 31st. The one downside of the DIY speaker: you can't wake it up and talk to it with a key word like "Alexa," as you can with Amazon's products. Instead, you'll need to physically press a button to issue voice commands.

• SourceAmit Jotwani (GitHub)