Thanks for the reply. Haven’t heard anything over on the webCore forums yet.
I am looking (in an ideal world) to pass a specific wake up time to Ask Alexa and have that determine the time(s) to run a “Morning Routine” piston(s) for the following day.
Taking your advice that maybe I had screwed up the logic in webCore, and I dumbed it down completely and simply tried to test a basic Do Piston that just turns on a switch and does nothing else. I created a webCore Trigger macro in Ask Alexa that triggers said piston and includes a custom acknowledgment message. I updated LIST_OF_MACROS to include the name of that macro. When I ask Alexa to ask smartthings to start run the macro, she responds with my custom acknowledgment and the following shows up in live logging:
But the piston doesn’t actually fire and the switch stays off. Ask Alexa is working otherwise, and I can turn things off and on and check status of sensors, etc. If I hit “Test” in webCore, the piston fires and the switch turns on. It seems somewhere there is a communication breakdown between Ask Alexa and webCore, so I can’t really even try to achieve my original goal until I figure out what I’ve done to keep the two from communicating.
Let me know if there are any other details I can provide that might help diagnose the issue.
So I guess I should have read the intervening comments before replying. My issue with Ask Alexa not firing webcore pistons was attributable to all webcore pistons around the world not firing due to some good old daylight saving issues (details on webcore forums). I’ve updated webCore and can now fire pistons via Ask Alexa with reckless abandon.
I still am a little stumped on trying to pass a ‘time’ variable to webcore via xParam (or any other way) or finding some workaround which will let me achieve my goal of setting my wakeup piston to run at constantly changing times with just my voice.
Let me know what you find out…I have never scene the volume drop on its own…However, what may be happening is the Sonos native app might be changing it and the DTH is syncing with that…
Welcome to another Friday. While the last few weeks have been a blur for new Echo features (and a new release of Ask Alexa that takes advantage of these features), I got this week to reflect on where Ask Alexa falls into the world of Amazon. Many of you have privately and openly messaged me about this so I thought I would address it.
First, Ask Alexa is NOT going anywhere! Many have been afraid I would abandon the development since Amazon came out with their Routines. On the contrary, Ask Alexa became MORE valuable as an app after this came out as the routines simply allowed me to give commands without an invocation word. This is great and something I have strived for since the early days of Alexa Helper (which, after 3 years, has become relevant again!). I will be the first admit, however, I have personally changed how I use Ask Alexa since this change. For items like how I set house at night (depending if I will be sleeping in or have to go to work), simply saying “good night” to Alexa is easier for everyone in the household and still runs my ‘decision macro’ on how to set the house. However, for more complex things like when I need a report I still “ask SmartThings” for the information or simply do a flash briefing (which I tie to a house report). To me, this has become MORE natural from a logical stand point…basic commands are now Alexa direct (Direct device control, running macros through routines), and querying HOW the house is an “Ask SmartThings” invocation or a simply flash briefing. Coming soon is the ability to change the flash briefing on the fly!
My ultimate goal (wish), however, is for Amazon to do everything (or over 90%) of what Ask Alexa does. When that happens, I will gladly focus my efforts into other areas of SmartThings; however, I don’t see this for another year….but it is on Amazon’s roadmap and I can’t wait for that day as EVERYONE ends up being a winner in that case!
Hi Micheal,
Thanks for all your efforts on this project. I’m new here and trying to get Ask Alexa going. I have the app installed, and have the lamda and Alexa skill all running. I can use the simulator and everything works (e.g. I can get status and even turn on my living room lamp from the simulator). Logs in the Smartthings IDE come through as expected. However, voice commands to my Echo do not work. I have the Ask Alexa skill enabled but it does not even respond to “Alexa, ask smartthings help”. Nothing gets through to the smarthtings IDE log. It’s almost as if the skill invocation word is not triggering the skill at all. I’ve trawled through thread etc but not found anything that helps. Any ideas on what might be amiss?
I kept researching and fixed it - I’ll post my own answer in case it is useful to others…
When I created the Alexa skill it was for US English but my echo is in the UK and set up for UK English. Adding UK English to the Skill fixed things.
My work around, for the time being, is saying “Alexa, ask smartthings to set my alarm for xx minutes after midnight”. It’s extremely clunky but I was having a lot of trouble with Ask Alexa not consistently passing a number into xParam rather than MNum or MParam until I created a specific utterance. That sets a global variable for the alarm time that feeds another piston which runs my morning routine at the appointed time. I also added a list of a text version of every number from 1-600 to the LIST_OF_WCP custom slot type so I can set the time any time until 10am.
But I don’t think my wife will ever take kindly to making the conversion to “minutes after midnight” to set the alarm herself. But I’ve proved to myself that it CAN be done, so now I just need to figure out how to make it cleaner.
I’ve found a possible solution. I’ve edited your intent schema to change the “type” for “xParam” to “AMAZON.TIME” instead of “LIST_OF_WCP” (which I’m sure will break something I’ll find my self wanting to do later), but I can use normal language to set the WebCoRE variable to a time now. I’ll be honest, I’m pretty far outside my realm of expertise in editing this stuff, so if there is way to use the built in amazon time slot type and still leave the the normal functionality alone in case I ever wanted to use it, I’m all ears. Regardless, thanks for a killer app that expands the capabilities for the rest of us.
The xParam is not used anywhere else, so if Amazon.Time works for you and you have no other use for that parameter, then you are golden! Very creative way to us it.
One word of warning…you will have to change it every time I publish an update to the intents, but if you are open to that, this should work for you!
I created a voice report called Battery Level Report. The only thing I selected was battery report and then all my battery devices. I selected “always play bettery level”. I updated all my slots and utterances and the intent schema. Smart apps are all the most current version as well as the Lambda code.
When I ask “Alexa, ask smartthings the status of Battery Level Report”, it responds with “there was an error processing this report”, and to contact you.
What did I do wrong? I recreated the report and my slots. Is it a bug?
Hmmm. That could get a bug but let’s try a couple things…first your syntax…what if you just say “Alexa, ask smartthings Battery Level Report”…do you get the same response? If so, what does live logging say?
Finally, what if you start with one device in the list and start adding them. My bet is that one device is screwing it up for the whole report.
Either way I should be able to fix this if any of those conditions above fix it.
That was it. It didn’t like my garage door sensors. Once I removed them, it worked fine. They are hidden sensors that work exclusively with the garage door opener, so I don’t think they’re a valid sensor, even though they are battery operated.
Had to use the word “status” to get the report to run.
Thank you so much for Ask Alexa. Go it all installed today.
A question i have is that even though i have set pin in the app, i am still able to unlock my door without a pin. During the initial setup i didnt have this set, but only set the pin option afterwards. Is there something else i need to do?
Good to know. Just curious…can you PM me with your device type and some screenshots of that device. Regardless if it isn’t supposed it should just crash the program. I would like to trap for it if I can. Thanks.
Yes. You must enable the pin (in settings) then enable it for the devices/functions you want. I made it very confident let so YOU can choose what operations need a pin or not.
Welcome to yet another Friday! Not much happened in the way of Alexa, but SmartThings really impressed me with their new updated mobile app. I like the addition of the fingerprint verification, but more importantly you now add/delete lock codes for your connected lock RIGHT FROM THE APP. And finally, we have the scenes…a long awaited addition to SmartThings, but something most apps (like Ask Alexa or WebCoRe) do a bit better. Obviously, I am investigating how Ask Alexa can utilize these…
Regarding Ask Alexa, I spent the last week continuing to work on the compound commands. There is a lot of buzz around this, and I have been working to make this work correctly. This has been a bit daunting as Amazon used to handle “the”, “an” and a plethora of other words by simply ignoring them. Well, some recent changes on their side make these actually something that you should have in your utterances. So I wrote a little spreadsheet to populate the utterances for the compound commands. I am not done yet, but I have generated over 200 unique utterances just for the compound commands. The good news is that your results should be VERY good when I release this small update. I say small, but it will require new Lambda code, new intents, and new utterances. However, the results will take the command structure to the next level. And I have coded the responses to compound commands rather uniquely; If you issue the same command to two different devices it responds to you in a very English manner. Instead of “I have turned off the switch and turned off the light”, it recognizes similar commands and simply says “I have turned off the switch and light”.
I will be the first to admit I am not a huge fan of using compound commands in my house. Most of the things I want to do are individual tasks or can be used in a group or macro. However, for those that have a use case, this will be a fantastic addition. For those of you that are not fans or get Alexa confused with your commands, you can actually turn the processing of compound commands off. Then, even if you issue a compound command it will process the first device you mention and not the other. Ask Alexa, at its heart, allows you to configure the app for how YOU use it, not how the programmer feels you should use it.
So, the big question…when will I release this…It is in the hands of the beta testers now and will expand that list this weekend. If all goes well it should be the first of December (a Friday) that I can get these out to everyone…an early Christmas present
