[NO LONGER SUPPORTED] Ask Alexa

Sometimes Alexa is too smart for their own good. the cloud tries to guess what you intend and will often “correct” words and phrases. Usually, the closer your instructions are to English grammar, the better the results.
With Ask Alexa, you can look at the live logging to see what the text commands are that the smartApp is receiving.

Sorry I wasn’t clear. I installed the garage door opener one day and the smart apps the next.

Yep…that is a response directly from Ask Alexa.

You should ensure your invocation is ‘smart things’ (two words)…not "smartthings’…

Ok…are you are using Ask Alexa to attempt to open the door, or the native Amazon commands (which will not open a garage door).

That is probably what I don’t understand. What do I need to do use Ask Alexa to open the door?

Thanks

For me it is “Alexa, ask smart things to open the garage door”. Of course, you have to have Ask Alexa installed and the garage door added to the app.

Does that help?

Yes. Thank you.

It’s not something I’ll use everyday; but, having the functionality is what I need.

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I just updated my AskAlexa SmartApp to 2.3.9gh directly from the repo. That then forced me to update the Lambda code and the Alexa Skill. After doing all of that I now get “There was a problem with the requested skill’s response” whenever I try to use the skill. This happens in he developer console, when testing, as well as just using the skill itself. The error I get in the alexa developer console is:

"reason": "ERROR",
		"error": {
			"type": "INVALID_RESPONSE",
			"message": "An exception occurred while dispatching the request to the skill."
		}

I deleted the Lambda function and the skill and started over, but I still get the same response. Also, I used the live logging links to copy and paste the code into the Lamdba function and the Skill, so the code should all be correct. Any ideas?

Hello Bryan,

Send me a PM if this doesn’t work, but if it worked before and now doesn’t I think it might be the embedded ID files within the Lambda code. Ensure they are not blank:

image

For anyone having this problem, the RAW lambda code from the SmartThings IDE log link did not have the initial backslash / to denote a comment in the first section of the code. I had to manually add it so the first line looks like this:

/* ---------------------------------------------------------------

There was also a trailing /** on the end of the file that I had to delete.

It may have just been a quirk in my installation but it is the code that the IDE link is outputting for me so it’s possible that someone else may run into the same problem.

I have seen this as a copy paste error…it appears the code is being generated properly, but I will give it another look to make sure.

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If I “Download Lambda Code” it looks fine. If I just “Display Lambda Code” it has the errors that I had to correct.

I’m using Chrome 72 on a Mac, if that makes any difference in the output.

Hey @MichaelS … are you planning to fix the ‘Weather Report’ extension with the new API?

I have been out of the community for a bit…the weather report no longer works? I will look through the forum and then test out the current functionality, but it shouldn’t be an issue to fix it…Was there an announcement of a change in API?

Yeah. Weather Underground is shutdown [no more getWeatherFeature()]. There is new API from The Weather Company.

If it’s a quick fix, it would be cool to get the weather up an running again. Thanks for considering an update.

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Thanks. Will look into it.

And to be clear, it is the Weather Reports that is giving you issues? You use that as a report that you call directly?

Seems like an obvious question, but here is my curiosity…Since Alexa natively has weather reporting I am just curious HOW you use it…a case could be make to deprecate this functionality in Ask Alexa. Not saying I would, but I personally stopped using it in lieu of the native reporting.

Let me know.

I like to do a bedtime Voice Report of my sensors with a weather report on the end. Like this… “All the windows and doors are closed and locked. Tomorrow the high temperature is 20 deg and mostly sunny.”

Gotcha! Will see what I can do…the API really changed and one of the items require GPS coordinates, so some of the advanced features of the weather report MAY not be available…( I may hack it and have some sort of zipcode to GPS coordinates conversion).

Will let you know when I need a tester.

could the data from the ST location api for lat, long, and zip be used?