There are hundreds of awesome maker projects based on Amazon’s Alexa that we don’t cover, as the service isn’t officially available in the country. We’re making an exception for ‘Project Yorick’, however, which is a robotic skull that answers your requests.

Maker Mike McGurrin, inspired by the Alexa Billy Bass, decided to modify a three-axis talking skull with moving eyes.

Using a Raspberry Pi and the AlexaPi software, McGurrin was able to hook up the skull as a client which uses sound to activate the jaw.

As you can see, it’s a little on the comical side due to the mismatched movement, but it’s worthy of a pricey haunted house.

You can find a full guide to replicate Project Yorick over on hackster.io. There’s two very amusing sections in that guide: the first schematic we’ve ever seen which includes bones, and the phrase ” it’s pretty expensive, due to the cost of the three-axis talking skull”.

If you’re wondering about the mention of CIA spying in the headline, it’s a reference to the recent Wikileaks data dump and this video that did the rounds recently. In it, a woman asks her Alexa if it’s connected to the CIA.

The Alexa seemingly ignores her question, prompting many people to believe that, as strange as it sounds, a machine was pleading the fifth.

It was apparently patched out shortly after, now answering with “no, I work for Amazon”.