I have to monetize at some point as the AWS costs will slowly get higher and higher but I would like to keep the core service free if possible and cover the costs with either advertising on the blog or some kind of sponsorship.
Yes, that’s when it seemed to happen, a few hours after the integration with IFTTT went live. It was either a malicious person trying to get my Skill disabled, or someone somehow doing something to trigger multiple requests to the Voice Monkey APIs through IFTTT…or just a complete coincidence.
Yes, I think the actual triggers were working but then they stopped. It seemed to coincide with someone on the Voice Monkey blog saying the same thing…maybe Amazon saw that and then disabled it.
Yeah I agree. There are plenty of other Skills and services that call the Alexa smart home APIs…it seems strange to disable a whole Skill when they could just throttle an individual user.
Just curious…what is the latest status?..The saving grace (for at least my house) is that my triggers still work, just the voice responses don’t (So I can say good night with the proper tasks but no monologue). So, I haven’t changed any of my pistons in anticipation of this coming back. If it isn’t, I need to start changing those.
Unfortunately and frustratingly, I don’t have an update from Amazon on when they might re-enable the Skill. I had a phone call with them today where they asked me a load of questions but I wasn’t given any timelines I’m afraid.
Hopefully it will be back soon!!
Understood…the good thing is that it wasn’t “Yes…it is permanently down”.
Also, before I get a lot of messages…my good night routine triggers a virtual switch which then triggers the response from voice monkey…I assume the voice monkey ‘button’ piece doesn’t work.
I really could have used this when my sump pump went weird today. Luckily I saw it when there was a little water out of the pit but I should have had an audible warning to not even have that happen.
Any timeline yet from Amazon? I am still holding off changing my pistons for this to come back. Also, have you considered two different products to get past the Amazon issue? One being an API driven button (to bypass the need for virtual buttons in SmartThings) and a voice speak on demand function API?
Awwwm maaan. So sorry! Hopefully it will be fixed soon!
No timeline yet, so sorry. I’m still in conversation with Amazon. They take such a long time to respond! The user who made the excessive calls has now been identified and is being questioned about what happened to help Amazon understand the situation.
Yeah I have considered two different Skills. I made a simple skill a while ago called Text To Voice https://texttovoice.io - I was considering adding an API to it, so it does the same thing as VM. It would be a temporary solution though and it would still need to go through certification which would take a while.
Yes could I do that, but it will take a long time to certify and also I’d need to create a new website and start the brand from scratch. Plus, there’s probably some kind of flag on my account so I doubt it would go down the usual certification route, any skill I publish would likely be monitored closely. I will have to consider this seriously though if the situation goes on for much longer.
Why does that matter, now that you added API throttling, that should remove any objection they have to your skill creating some kind of performance hit on Amazon/Echo services.
Awwwm maaan. So sorry! Hopefully it will be fixed soon!
It is not your fault at all. Amazon is very disappointing with this. They should think about their actions before they do something that could have real adverse effects.
Thanks for making this.
P.S. I just saw your update. Hooray. Hopefully VM is back this week.
True, it’s all very secretive. I don’t know what the issues are or what they’re looking into specifically…I suppose they need to protect themselves and can’t rely on Skill developers to implement the solution so maybe they’re looking into adding some kind of limits at their end.
I have no idea when it will be back, I hope it’s this week, but I’ve got no indication from Amazon I’m afraid.
Some progress is being made.
Could someone who had the VM skill previously enabled let me know what happens when try and open the Skill? i.e. “Alexa, open Voice Monkey”
@voice_monkey - A routine that hasn’t triggered in weeks suddenly triggered this morning using the skill.
I was previously sending a web request to activate an Alexa routine to turn a TV on (with no notification in the URL), and the TV came on. I just tried again and sending the web request did again trigger the already programmed routine.
So, it appears its partially working again. I can trigger routines that are already setup, but I can’t do announcements, I can’t access the page to make any changes, and the skill still doesn’t show up in my skills in the Alexa app.
