Thank you @Terri_Baker for pointing out the Voice Monkey Skill
I may have found a better solution for all this virtual contact sensor nonsense using that skill to trigger voice announcements, or technically any routine in Alexa you want, from Webcore. Plus, you can use your variables in Webcore as part of the announcement with this. This was something I was going to miss the most in Echo Speaks. Also, with the webcore webrequest, you can bypass IFTTT and send the request straight from Webcore to the Voice Monkey skill
Instructions to setup the skill are here voicemonkey.io . Once setup, create a routine in the device you want to speak that opens the Voice Monkey Skill like this:
Then, in webcore, setup whatever trigger you want, and as action do “make a webrequest” using location. You will do a GET request like this. Replace the access token and secret token with the one generated in your own VoiceMonkey Skill (my own is blacked out of course). Also replace “announce-door” with the name of the “monkey” you created in your voice monkey skill (more info on what that means in the Voicemonkey documentation at the link above). Put whatever you want her to say in the quotes after urlEncode, including quote breaks and any variable in your piston you want her to say. My example tells the weather using a global variable “@forcast”:
This skill looks like it has awesome potential. It was a little complex to setup, and does seem you would need to make a separate web request and routine for each device you want to have speak, so could be a pain if you want to announce on multiple devices, but still seems to work well for a lot of scenarios.
I received a SmartThings “platform upgrade” notification regarding upgrading to the new Alexa skill.
Do I need to unlink (delete) the Classic SmartThings Alexa before linking the new SmartThings app to Alexa?
My Konnected door/window sensors rely on the Groovy IDE. So will it still work with the new Alexa Skill? Will my custom Alexa notifications when doors open still work?
It is being discontinued, in about a year. The takeaway is you WILL have to migrate you just don’t have to do it YET. but if Konnected already has a new format integration you should plan on moving to it as soon as its feasible for you.
It’s too bad because I it was a huge learning curve to learn everything. Once set up, it’s been running without any issues for a couple years. Now the rug gets pulled out from underneath me and I have to start all over. I don’t have the patience to train myself all over again.
For those of us who don’t live and breath this stuff, we just want to get our homes setup and leave be. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
This is tech, tech doesn’t work like that. The useful life of about ANYTHING in IT is ~3 years. I was SHOCKED ST supported the v.1 hub firmware for 8 years. The industry as a whole has to do a better job of setting appropriate expectations with end users. I get it - marketing folks want things to appear as ‘cheap’ and ‘easy’ and ‘set and forget.’ But the reality of the situation - it very much is not any of those things… Well, at least not if you want anything of quality. In HA the adage: “Sure you can have cheap, functional, and high quality… Pick TWO.” VERY much applies. Home Automation is more IT than consumer electronics, it’s an emerging technology that hasn’t completely figured itself out, and there are considerations beyond just fitting it all together (security for one) that requires constant maintenance and updates.
That said, I’m not giving ST a free pass here. There is a limit to the amount of change any end user can consume at once. Samsung / SmartThings have FAR exceeded that threshold by anyone’s best estimation by an order of magnitude.
The issue I have is - have a solid plan of action to seamlessly migrate current to new.
I have no issue with upgrades, but don’t roll them out until the “upgrade” lives up to its name. It shouldn’t be a downgrade and destroy what people worked hard to setup until they work out all the kinks and decide whether what we had before will even be supported.
100% agree, migrate to a new app, fix your rules, oh yeah new alexa integration, oh btw some things don’t work on the new app like they used.
For me I am migrating and just going to give up on my voice integration until they fix the allowing all devices on voice. It is really only going to break one major thing for me, my three year old loves to turn off his noise machine in the morning from the echo.
thankfully most everything else is automated / can use other cloud integrations that voice breaking is more of a eh i guess I wait then a need it now.
In the SmartThings instructions, it doesn’t say to remove the Classic Alexa skill. Do we need to do this before enabling the new SmartThings Alexa skill?
Have done this before but tried again. Did find some strange Kasa devices duplicated that were only confirmable by MAC address. Might help with the Kasa issues I’ve been having.
Still, the device giving me problems this morning wasn’t a duplicate and is a Zigbee plug.
Thanks for this. I’ve tried this multiple times, just without the delays in steps 2 and 3. Really frustrating to have none of my routines work, and then re-create them multiple times with no luck.
Hrrm, unfortunately no dice. Just created a test routine to turn on my basement lights with the basement motion sensor detects motion. Walked right up to it, saw that it detect motion through the Alexa app, but the routine didn’t fire and the lights didn’t turn on.
The triggers for me have really not been working right today. It’s what drove me to try the voice monkey skill I mentioned above. I had an announcement trigger almost an hour after the contact sensor closed.
It’s probably not anything you’re doing wrong. I’d give it a day or two. The engineers keep posting they’re working to fix it.
