Video: One of the best parts of Solo: A Star Wars Story is Lando Calrissian’s piloting droid, L3-37, who’s been uniquely pieced together and upgraded from parts of other droids. Patrick Stefanski has essentially done the same thing to turn Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant into a desktop version of L3-37 who answers to your beck and call.
The customisability of Amazon’s Echo speakers, which feature Alexa built-in, is quite limited. So in order to make his L3-37 actually respond to the simple phrase “Elthree”, Stefanski instead used a software version of Alexa running on a Raspberry Pi3 mini computer.
It also allowed Stefanski to alter his location so that his Alexa-powered L3-37 speaks in a British accent, similar to actor Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s performance of the character in the movie.
The best customisation feature, however, might be L3-37 responding with an apathetic “whut?” whenever she’s asked a question.
[YouTube via TechCrunch]