Welcome to another Friday! There has been a LOT going on this week! Google released news about a whole plethora of items. I ordered a new Pixel phone to replace my aging Nexus phone, and it appears I get a new Google Home mini. Great…I use my current Google Home about once per month, so this might just go on eBay. 
In bigger news, Sonos released an Alexa skill and a new device with Alexa built in. This is what I have been waiting for!! SmartThing’s implementation of the Sonos devices was rather average, and I had to do some coding magic to get it to work in Ask Alexa. Unfortunately, the skill doesn’t work very well for me (it doesn’t play new music…it just can control the speaker with play, mute, etc). When this finally works I will be pulling out all control mechanisms for the Sonos from Ask Alexa. This does NOT mean that anything happens with the Message Queue or the Voice reporting of the speaker state…only the basic commands that are not native to Alexa (play, mute, pause, etc). I like less complicated code. Unless I hear a rather good reason from the user community, this will be remarked out in the code in the next few versions.
Speaking of the Message Queue, Ask Alexa has yet another partner app that it is compatible with. @yvesracine has released the MyFlair Devices (Puck,Vent,HvacUnit) & Service Manager with Ask Alexa Message Queue support. This makes 18 integrations with other developer apps, the largest in the SmartThings community. Be sure to check out the thread here: NEW - [RELEASE] FLAIR DEVICES with new capabilities for building physical zones in your home and controlling your mini/window splits, portable heaters/coolers
Finally, I am actively working on version 2.3.3. Until then, be sure to refresh your IDE apps and utterances as I have updated them this week after finding some obscure issues with the help of @Kneemuh and @joelw135. Please find the latest versions here: http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=Ask_Alexa#Latest_Version
Speaking of versions, I have deviated from my original roadmap that I published months ago. My next Friday ‘essay’ will go over the changes. It is all good! I dropped the ‘for fee’ model I was working on as, frankly, Amazon now has it on their roadmap and I don’t like creating redundancy without value. However, I have moved to include more things like compound messages and making Alexa ‘smarter’ with more logic to do more things with one command. Be on the lookout for this roadmap next week.
Until then….enjoy!