Alexa who? This jailbroken Echo Spot runs a custom Android skin and reports to a PC

The Echo Spot is a smart speaker with Alexa, and Amazon once sold it as “the alarm clock, reinvented.” Its smarts are not just limited to telling you the current time or weather, and the nearly spherical smart speaker also lets you make video calls and play videos from Amazon Prime. However, the first generation is nearly a decade old and does not make it to the list of devices slated to support Alexa Plus. Don’t expect it to do anything more than that; you might as well flex your hacking muscle and turn it into something more useful, as this one person did.

An ingenious user turned their Echo Spot, thrifted for just $4, into a more customized control panel that does much more than what Amazon intended. The custom Echo Spot offers market insights, runs a local speech-to-text tool, displays PC usage stats, and even updates the user on the status of the tasks assigned to Claude Code. There are a few more nifty things it can do, but the more fascinating bit is that the whole dashboard was designed using Claude. Even more interesting is that Claude Code guided the user through the process step by step, and the only thing they accomplished from their own wealth of wisdom was plugging the Spot into their PC and telling Claude Code to help them build a custom interface.

User PartiallyFrozen detailed the abilities on Reddit, also noting how Claude guided them through the process of rooting the Echo Spot, installing LineageOS, and then building the custom UI for the circular screen. The Android-based interface interacts with a lightweight AI agent running on the user’s PC, also created with Claude.

The entire project has been uploaded to GitHub for anyone who wants to replicate or improve upon it. If you do want to take the harder route, as some others have, you can install a decently usable LineageOS build on the first-gen Echo Spot, but trying to make it work like a regular Android device will require a lot of patience and skill. Good luck with that!