[RELEASE] Alexa Helper

[MichaelS (Micheal)]

For those that want to play with programming in the Echo environment, Keith ( @N8XD ) put together a nice demo of an app he created.

AskHome - Alexa/SmartThings programmers kit. Alexa can do anything

Hi Guys, In real life you view your home as a structure filled with rooms, people, and objects. This kit helps you use Alexa to interact with your house by talking about those things - and not a list of devices. …which is great if you are helping someone non-technical make a smarthome. This is not a supported release, but a “share”. I’m sharing what I’ve done, and giving you the code so you can try it yourself if you want. Here is a short video with a few sample interactions from my home - and the kit code: documentation, smartApp, cut/pastes for alexa skills and lambda is here – https://github.com/n8xd/AskHome. The demo code is configured to work with some things at my house…to make it YOUR AskHome, you’ll have to program your house into it. The AskHome kit is for groovy pro…

Keith helped me get started with the basics of programming the Echo. As he states, his code will take some heavy programming to make it custom for your environment. If you want something that will work ‘out of the box’, Ask Alexa (my new app) will be what you are looking for. Ask Alexa will still need a lot of fundamental understanding of navigating the Amazon developer site, but my SmartApp will provide you all of the variables you need to get it working with your environment.

I highly recommend looking at what Keith did, if anything, to get familiar with the Amazon environment.