Teaching Alexa What To Do

In the last post I described combining an Alexa custom skill with an Alexa smart home skill. Well, I got that working this past week and it works great. The combination really has some interesting potential.

Chihuahua and electronics
Just a cute little doggie watching me wire stuff together.

Smart home skills are great because they’re short and simple, and the supported device names can be extended dynamically through the “discovery” process.

Custom skills are great because they’re very flexible, and allow interactive dialog, unless something fits into a lot, isn’t extensible.

Putting the two together can provide the best of both. Here’s what a dialog with Alexa sounds like using both the Patriot smart home skill and the new Patriot custom skill.

Initially the skills don’t know about any activity called “computing”. So when I say:

“Alexa, turn on playing piano”, it responds with “Sorry, I didn’t find playing piano”.

That’s as expected. So let’s teach Alexa what we want it to do when we say “playing piano”. Note that I’ve made the invocation words “my lights”.

“Alexa, tell ‘my lights’ to turn on office when I say playing piano”

Then Alexa responds with:

“Ok, from now on when you say ‘playing piano’ I will set ‘office’ to 100 percent. This is a new activity, so you’ll need to tell me to ‘discover devices’ if you want to use the smart home command ‘start playing piano’.”

How cool is that?

So then saying “Alexa, discover devices” results in “Ok, found one new device ‘playing piano'”.

And then I can say “Alexa, start playing piano” and the office light comes on.

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