When a company is making a bad decision, I will give them every opportunity to change direction and be very very vocal about it. My entire career has been about escalating just business cases to management when execs/dev/engineering are making bad decisions and frankly I’m darned good at it. That comes with picking the right battles for the right reasons and translating the reasons to the KPIs that executives understand.
In the current tech climate they’d better darned well understand privacy and security.
You may be right Tony, but until they actually shutdown the skill without fixing the issue, they have an opportunity to show that they’re listening to the community… …or not. If not, then they deserve the end result.
This is some of the dumbest, BS decision I have ever heard a company make. Basically saying F you customers and your privacy concerns. We need to do what we need to do. This says everything with regards to ST concern for customers. Absolute rubbish.
The insanity of this statement is mind blowing. Moving foward with the new Alexa app when it creates numerous safety, privacy and security issues. I have a feeling the reason they are moving foward is a fix will not be around for months not weeks. It has already been months.
Maybe someone with a larger number of followers on social media needs to point out how smartthings decision is not in the best interest of their user.
I have not tried this yet, but just saw new IFTTT service that may provide a EchoSpeaks TTS workaround (for webcore users at least): https://www.thomptronics.com/about/notify-me
EDIT-Others have pointed out that this is not instant TTS like EchoSpeaks, it makes the yellow ring appear on echo, then you have to ask Alexa what the notification is.
I’ve been using the Notify Me skill with Webcore doing POST requests to the Notify Me server. It has been working well but was clunky to setup and needed a lot of programming in Webcore. It triggers the yellow notification ring when different events happen, then you ask Alexa, “What’s my Notification” and she tells you.
This IFTTT integration sounds much easier to setup. Thanks I’ll have to give it a try.
“Notifications” on the echo platform require that the person in the room notice that the echo ring has turned yellow and then specifically ask for notifications to be read. And once they are read in one room they are no longer available in the other rooms
They are different from “announcements“ where the echo speaks without having to be prompted. And the announcement can be spoken on multiple echo devices Simultaneously if desired.
Yes good point. It doesn’t actually say anything until you ask it, so it’s not instant TTS.
I have it setup if my garage door tries closing but doesn’t (like the sensor stopped it), it then sends me the notification “Garage door failed to close”. That way if I wasn’t right near an Echo, but walk by one later, I notice it flashing yellow, ask her what’s my notification, and she tells me “You have one new message, from Notify My: the garage door failed to close”
So its not exactly TTS, its more like an answering machine with a message on it. Still definitely useful in some cases though, but different.
I can not find the original post to give credit too (maybe in webcore community) but it suggested a work around for TTS with Alexa. It uses the voice monkey Alexa skill.
Let me be clear, THIS IS NOT MY WORK, and I will post the original link as soon as I can find it.
I created a piston that triggered a device to turn on (or off) and auto turn off (or on) after 2 mins.
I then created a voice monkey generated URL. (shows up as a trigger for Alexa routines)
In IFTTT, I used webhooks to link the voice monkey url to the device that turned on.
In Alexa, create a routine that is triggered by the voice monkey trigger. You can have Alexa say something or make an announcement when the trigger is fired.
Again, I will post the original link giving credit where it is due as soon as I can locate it again.
With the September 9th update to SmartThings, will Alexa integration still work if you are outside of the US and Alexa does not show under voice assistants? Alexa does show under linked services, but not under voice assistants. I’m hoping I don’t need to make a new account.
I migrated to the New Skill last week and although all devices were added, I didn’t have any big issues. Everything is working fine and it’s faster than the Old Skill…
I went into the Classic App and un-selected all devices, deleted the Old Skill. I then logged into Alexa.Amazon.com and removed all devices. I then waited an hour, added the New Skill in the New App and discovered new devices.
I had to recreate all of my Groups and rename a couple of devices but all in all, it went smooth.
I’ll sure be glad when this is resolved. When Alexa routines are working when triggered for periods of time, I think, Great - maybe it is finally corrected, and then, BAM, right back to the problems.
Same for me. Routines were firing via sensor triggers fine and then today, not so much. 4 to 5 minute delay. Hopefully they’ll have it fixed before the Sept 8th deadline or hold off until they do.
You would hope, wouldn’t you? Alas, it seems there’s a drive to blindly push this through even though the product is BROKEN. I just don’t understand the logic behind this decision…
We also have too many things happening on Sept 8th:
Echo speaks - gone
Sonos TTS through WebCore - gone (there is currently no alternative for those that use variables to capture dynamic text to be read out - such as daily weather reports etc).
Old Alexa skill - discontinued
Old Google Home integration - discontinued
…all on the same day, it’s ridiculous planning from ST and a recipe for disaster.
Before the update i had my living room blinds (2 units) grouped with the name “blinds”. I could say “Alexa set blinds to 30%” and both blinds would respond.
After the update giving tha above order Alexa says it is not possible. The only possibility within this group is “open blinds or close blinds” and couldn t figure how to set percentage as i was doing before the update.
In the other hand, if i try to control by voice individually this blinds by the name of the device ex: "Alexa livingroomblue blinds 20% " it will work.
I found it frustrating. An alternative would be to set routines for each percentage which doesn t make sense.
Can anyone help me manage the group of blinds to be able to set the percentage by voice?
Woke up this morning to Alexa telling me I should relink my (SmartThings) skill for a light to work…
Worked fine using the SmartThings app. Not sure what’s happening, but piece by piece, the whole platform seems to be crumbling away.
