Amazon Alexa help

[jcarlson]

Hi All,

 

Just wondered if someone could give me some pointers. A member of staff has very kindly donated a couple of Alexa's to. our school, and as we have children with special needs, we the school would like to try and set these up to teach the children how things can be automated, ie switching on lights, and other stuff. 

I'm one week in at this school, and have been given this as a job to sort out. Do the School need to create an Amazon account in order to get this working, and how will it work with our firewall, Securly?

 

Any help would be great.

 

J Carlson

[PotNoodleTech]

I would imagine you would need an amazon account and also to do some work on your firewall to enable it to contact home.

 

Given that all alexa does is listen to everything you say all day and then transmit it all back to some random americans - I would say it's probably a bad idea to have them in school from a data protection point of view, possible even more of a bad idea in a special school where data lis likely to be even more confidential.

 

[jcarlson]

All your points are very valid. However, they have a dedicated couple of rooms in the school that are setup as rooms in the home. And with the older pupils, its getting them used to independance, and looking at ways to make things easy for them.

Thanks for the advice though.

[PotNoodleTech]

Sure it sounds like it could work - just make sure everyone is acutely aware that those two rooms have zero privacy and to not discuss anything confidential in them.

 

Maybe buy one to try it out?

[Rob_D]

You'll definitely need an amazon account to link them to and you'll need to be careful no-one inadvertently signs the account up for amazon music or another paid service.

 

I would probably set up a separate VLAN for this. The Alexas themselves will need a bunch of holes in both your firewall (link below) and webfiltering and I'm pretty sure you can't set static IPs on them. It will also make it easier/safer to add other home automation things. 

 

https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/alexa-smart-properties/networking-best-practices.html