🌱La Cool Co. a smart environmental assistant powered by Alexa!

At Smartly.ai, we love to showcase cool hackers pushing the limits of conversational AI. Today we are excited to present you La Cool Co.
it’s vision and how they are using Alexa to give a voice to your plants!

Grow anything, anywhere.

At La Cool Co. is specialized in monitoring and controlled environments. We design and develop smart, straightforward and playful devices that improve the well-being of any kind of plant.
This adventure began in 2013. Since, we have been developing an open source greenhouse kit composed by lasercut wood, an Arduino board, standard plastic boxes and a set of open hardware sensors, components and LEDs.

Each greenhouse can independently control air temperature, humidity, luminosity, soil moisture and water feed of up to three plants, as well as capture image/video footage used to provide time lapse videos of the plant growth.
From the beginning, we’ve dreamt about this system that will always give our plants what they need.
Everyday, La Cool Co.‘s is promoting its vision of an open source environmental system with everyone : open growers, every makers, with kids, teachers or educators, and now companies which are focus on climate changes and environment preservation. Let’s grow it !

Alexa + LaCoolCo

Our device is gathering a huge amount of data from the plants, dealing with all this data can be very painful.
With Alexa, all this data become conversational !
Searching a way to add chatbot feature and enter Alexa’s world for our products, we stumbled on Smartly.ai which for good, reduce in a significant way time of coding, needed for the establishment of an Alexa app.
Thanks to them, in less than one hour, we produced a first PoC to present it for clients and investors.

Next Steps

Our first PoC is straightforward but can be improved.
We plan some to make iterations on this skill by leveraging our plants database. We would also like to match with official taxonomy names and the vernacular ones. (a tomato, isn’t a tomato : it’s a solanum lycopersicum for Science)
To finish, we aim to combine our livestream datalloging system with Alexa apps. And I hope it will be happen soon because we’re already using AWS system for our projects.
In this case, if we’ll give people a tool to easily communicate with their plants, with external databases from everywhere, we’ll be able to bring them the best advices to grow their plants.
We would also love to leverage push notifications so the plant can say:
” Hey, you forget to water me this week, fix that or I will kick your ***!”
Adding some personality to the plants is also something we are looking at 😃

Antoine Berr, President of  La Cool Co.

If you too, you ♥ your plants, and want to know how they feel,
drop an email to this awesome team: [email protected] !