The Amazon Echo will allow you to control a limited number of home automation devices by voice. If you want to control device types that it doesn’t know about, or perform more sophisticated actions, the Echo doesn’t provide any native options. This code emulates the Belkin WeMo devices in software, allowing you to have it appear that any number of them are on your network and to link their on and off actions to any code you want.

Source: fauxmo/README.md at master ยท makermusings/fauxmo