This Alexa-enabled coffee pot isn’t great at making coffee, but dang it’s cute

It was only about a month ago that we discovered the Alexa-enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass, and now a couple of enterprising college students have created a muppet-esque talking coffee pot. To get their device working, the two students, David Frank and Carter Hurd, ran Alexa on a Raspberry Pi and hooked up a microphone. An Arduino controlled the coffee maker. They can ask their googly-eyed coffee maker for the weather! D’aw. But they can’t tell it to make them coffee. We’ll get to that in a second, though.

The two students added two arms to the machine: one for putting the coffee filter in its place and another for scooping coffee grounds. As you can see in the above video, the coffee scooping didn’t go so well. It only scooped a baby amount of grounds.

As I mentioned, the coffee maker also can’t be told to start brewing coffee. Someone needs to manually trigger it to do so. But hey, can’t we see ourselves in this slightly busted coffee pot? We’re trying to get coffee grounds in a filter, even though we’re physical incapable of doing so. We’re trying our best! I don’t know, there’s probably a metaphor for 2016 here. The students say their next goal is to get the machine to respond to “Alexa, make me coffee” with a fresh pot.