Jarssistant

Use Google Assistant or a Google Home device to execute custom commands on your computer. Jarssistant is a small and dumb utility which uses Dropbox and IFTTT to listen for incoming commands. It then utilizes a similarity algorithm to compare your command with it's locally stored list of pre-defined set commands. You don't need to say commands exactly in order or completely. If your phrase has a similarity level close to a match, jarssistant just goes ahead with executing it.

Documentation

Starts jarssistant as a service

# jars -s -d

Stops jarssistant service

# jars -k

Adds jarssistant to your startup services

# jars -a

Removes jarssistant from your startup services

# jars -z

Shows jarssistant service status

# jars -p

Reloads jarssistant configuration file

# jars -r

Points you to ifttt service applet configuration page

# jars -i

Cool Stuff

Here are some of the things you can do:

• Synchronize your git repositories
• Send a message to your team with Slack when you are going out
• Update your computer
• Turn off your system remotely if you forgot to do so
• Use your Raspberry Pie at home to turn on your computer remotely
• Restart your production server
• Launch a shuttle into orbit with just a voice command
• ...etc (YMMV. Use the power of bash, command line utilities, curl, public APIs and your imagination)

Installation

With npm do:

# npm install -g jarssistant

IFTTT configuration

1. Go to your applets page
2. Click New Applet
3. Click on + this
4. Search for Google Assistant
5. Click Say a phrase with a text ingredient
6. In section "What do you want to say?" type in execute $
7. Click Create trigger
8. Click on + that
9. Search for Dropbox
10. Click Append to a text file
11. In section "File name (required), type in a file name in your Dropbox directory. We'll be using this later.
12. In section "Content (required)", type in {{TextField}} and get rid of everything else.
13. In section "Dropbox folder path", type in the folder name to hold the relay file. Default is: IFTTT
14. Click Create action and you are done.
15. Test your applet to make sure everything is fine.

Configuration

• dropbox_relay or environment variable JARS_DROPBOX_RELAY_PATH: specify the full path of Dropbox relay file that you configured on ifttt. e.g. /Users/tony.stark/Dropbox/jars_relay.txt

defaults to: $HOME/Dropbox/IFTTT/jars_relay.txt

• threshold or environment variable JARS_THRESHOLD: jarssistant compares all locally defined custom commands with the one coming from your assistant device. It would not execute it if it is below this threshold level. Similarity is a number between 0 and 1, with 0 meaning no similarity at all and 1 meaning a perfect match. You can arrive at your magic threshold number using trial and error.

• Copy config.json.example to /etc/jarssistant.conf and modify it as you wish.

• After each modification, you need to reload jarssistant service to re-read the configuration file.

Ideas

1. Adding jars learn to learn and automatically add your last bash command to configuration file.
2. Maybe reading back command output through Google Assistant.
3. Third-party service integration.
4. Ack messages if commands were successful through Google Assistant.

Command Definition

Each command has 5 sections.

• name: choose a friendly name for your command
• type: currently, only bash commands are supported.
• description: describe what this particular command does, so that you don't forget
• command: a string consisting of a bash command. You can chain multiple bash commands in the following format: command1; command2; command3; ...; command N
• keywords: a string consisting of phrases you normally use to execute this command. Be as descriptive as possible. For instance, if you normally say update jarssistant repository on columbia but you might occasionally say synchronize jarssistant git repository on my desktop then use a keywords argument containing all of them: update synchronize my git jarssistant repository on my desktop columbia

Caveats

• You can take a look at config.json.example for very simple ideas.
• Don't forget to reload jarvis configuration after adding your new commands with jars -r.
• Don't use potentially destructive commands. I don't take responsibility for your blown up computers, lost data or fried circuit boards.
• For turning computers on, you can send a magic packet with a wake on lan tool like this.
• To enable debugging, set the DEBUG environment variable to debug. e.g. export DEBUG=debug; jars -s
• Share your ideas with other people.
• I'm completely new to the art of node. Please excuse the funky code here. This has been a weekend fun project for me, for fun and profit.