Did you get a notification that the voicemonkey you created was linked to Alexa or can you see it in your device list?
Hi Rene,
Iâve replied to your blog comment but we have had other users experience this error recently. It seems to be an Alexa issue.
Whatâs worked for others is leaving it 24 hours when it magically fixes itself.
Otherwise you could try uninstalling and reinstalling the Alexa app and restarting your router.
I hope you manage to fix it.
Christian
Ok thanks, will try out these options.
Update: Waited a few hours and now it works!
I was just wondering if current the feature set that a group of Echos ânow only speak in sequential order, not in unisonââŚhas been update so they announce in unison (simultaneously)?
I donât see anything on the voice monkey site but I have not had reliable announcements since the Amazon Web Services outage last week.
Does anyone have insights into this?
Thanks
Fixed now.
I disabled and then enabled the skill as mentioned in the troubleshooting and it worked.
Hi my friend, the very first time I tried to add the device I got same error. After some post intents then works, seems like some delay after 10-15 minutes, then I can get the Monkey deviceâŚ
Wow, I missed a lot of stuff over the past couple years.
Currently I have Alexa announcing laundry wash and dry cycle completion on all devices, and that will continue. But for the dryer detecting motion, and then asking if you are starting a dryer cycle, I think this Monkey will ultimately be a better choice. It will allow time-based greetings, for example.
Iâm looking forward to playing with it!
Got an email this morning stating that there is a Pro plan for VM. Making it paid should allow it to continue, the price is reasonable I think, and I plan to subscribe. I donât really see the benefit of the Basic plan. I would think having one text to speech option set in the web interface would make sense but maybe that is too difficult to code.
I would like the developer to put more information here and on the website. Especially explaining what value there is in the basic plan. If there is none I would just drop it.
Hi allâŚso yes I had to finally introduce a paid plan as I was processing millions of requests every month and the AWS costs were just too high to sustain. Hopefully the new yearly price is ok for most folk.
Iâm not intending to make much money here, the fee should hopefully cover just operating costs.
To answer questions regarding the basic plan, this is for users who only need Virtual Triggers/Buttons (Monkeys) to be able to trigger Alexa routines. The free basic plan gives you access to unlimited (up to 300) Monkeys and unlimited API requests.
The Pro Plan includes TTS (Text-to-speech) and all other features.
Happy to answer any further questions.
FYI - I still need to do a lot of work on documentation and providing examples, particularly for the new features.
These have now been released and include those mentioned further up this thread:
Presets
Save a set of parameters from the Playground and trigger this pre-defined set of parameters (Preset) from within an Alexa Routine.
This will allow you to more easily create hierarchical parent->child relationships.
Yes/No Prompts
Using Monkeys and Presets, create a flow which triggers a Yes/No question from Alexa which then triggers a specific Preset based on the response.
For example, you walk into the kitchen, a motion sensor is triggered, Alexa says âWould you like me to turn on the lights?â. If you answer âYesâ, lights go on, if you answer âNoâ, nothing happens.
Chime
Play a notification sound/alarm from a selection of available sounds before an announcement begins.
Audio
Send through the URL of an audio file for it to play through your Alexa device.
Background Audio
Add an audio backing track to announcements.
As well as this, Voice Monkey is now available in Brazil, Italy and France.
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@voice_monkey Thanks for the quick reply and making it paid I think makes sense so it doesnât disappear.
I think this is one thing that could use more explanation. Do you mean that the response triggers another monkey and then an Alexa routine fires off due to that monkey being called? So if you have 5 different lights you want this to work on you would need 10 monkeys? That is, the âquestionâ monkey and âyesâ monkey for each light?
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Yes, this is the most difficult one to explain and to set-up. I created it as a VM user requested it and I thought it was a good idea.
I currently use it so that when I walk into the garage, motion detector senses my movement and triggers this yes/no question, Alexa says âWould you like me to turn on the treadmill?ââŚif I say yes then it triggers a routine which switches on the smart plug for my treadmill 
For turning on multiple lights are you able to group them e.g. âdownstairs lightsâ and then use this group in the routine? So when the Monkey triggers this routine it switches the whole group on?
If you can only switch them on individually, then you could create one Monkey and then 5 separate routines for each light, with the same Monkey as the trigger.
I was thinking basement light, garage light, bedroom light, etc for my example. So distinct lights.
I am not thinking of using this but just trying to understand how this would work. I could use the yes/no feature for something else and then I would need 3 monkeys.
Thanks
Hello,
I have a bit of success making monkey triggers that work from Home Assistant (HA) in individual automations manually. I am looking to take it up a notch and see if i can create an integration or a blueprint that will let me build the URL that triggers everything from HA itself. Any thoughts on this would be helpful. I have worked with the Voice Monkey (VMK) support and i have gotten the payload triggers for pictures and music to work pulling from my google drive.
So, as my entry into this community I hope I did not overstep my ask, or over state how useful the VMK has been.