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Different skill name than 'Homeseer'?

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    #16
    Originally posted by naellis View Post
    I'm pondering a similar question as I am interested in knowing if the Echo/Dot device name is accessible in any way to use as a 'location' in a custom skill. I was wondering if it might be possible to say something like "Alexa, tell homeseer to turn the lights on" and the Dot in the room that hears it somehow adds the 'location'. Why else have a unique device name if it can't be used more effectively.
    Trouble is that doesn't work when you're not heard as being "in" the room. We have a very open floor plan, with lots of wood floors and it's a toss-up as to which Alexa device will actually hear the commands.

    However, there are situations where knowing which Alexa device heard it could be useful. Not just for "turn on the lights" and have it automagically figure out what you meant. Unless you're living in an apartment with only one source of light in a given room. But they're you not likely to have multiple Alexa devices. So it's one of those seems like a good idea, but really isn't a large enough market opportunity to actually make sense to implement.

    Where I'd see it useful would be as a means to 'narrow down' likely intentions. The Alexa system itself does some of this already. If you ask it "turn on the kitchen" and you have more than one device with 'kitchen' in the name it'll prompt you for which one. it doesn't make the next leap and rattle off a list of them (boy, THAT would be helpful). But little things like this go a long way toward reinforcing customer satisfaction with buying automation gear.

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      #17
      I agree it will depend on room layouts for best effect, so it should be optional. However, having invested a lot of money in Zwave devices I'm not really interested in Echo compatible kit such as Hue, even though I bought a couple just to try ! For me it's going to be all about how to get Echo to talk to HS in the most efficient and intelligent way possible. I've got an Echo in the Kitchen, a dot in the sitting room and another in the master bedroom just to play with. I'm not getting any 'cross-talk' between any of them and they work great. It looks to be a great platform to try to build the voice controlled home, so back to my first point of whether the echo device name could be used as the 'location'.

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        #18
        The HS3 has no way of linking specific HS devices to specific echo's, so there's really no way to do it with the conventional custom skill setup.

        You would need to set up your own skill for each echo device.

        Each skill would need a lambda function that talks to a processing page on your HS3 server. (an aspx page).

        You would send the info to the page with a qualifier, and in the page determine which HS devices are to be controlled by the incoming request.

        Then process the request and send it to HS3 via JSON.


        Not simple, but very doable.
        Wade

        "I know nothing... nothing!"

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          #19
          Originally posted by Sgt. Shultz View Post
          Not simple, but very doable.
          Well it's good to hear it could be done but I personally wouldn't know how to actually code it. Anyone interested in making something like this work ?

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            #20
            Originally posted by naellis View Post
            Well it's good to hear it could be done but I personally wouldn't know how to actually code it. Anyone interested in making something like this work ?
            Also interested in this.

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              #21
              Originally posted by Sgt. Shultz View Post
              You would need to set up your own skill for each echo device.
              If I'm not mistaken, skills are account-wide, not device specific. So you'd have to create a separate Amazon account for each and every Alexa device. Not exactly ideal.

              You could, of course, create a separate custom skill for each device, as long as each skill had a unique name. Again, not exactly ideal. I suppose that'd allow something like creating a skill if you had separate HS servers running at different locations. As in, "Alexa, ask 'the house' to turn on..." or "Alexa, as 'the boat' to..." and you've have to have separate HS accounts, each linked to that particular skill and server. Quite the bit of spit-and-bailing-wire kind of lash-up though.

              So until Amazon gets around to attaching a device-specific identifier there's really no decent way to approach this without a lot of hassles.

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                #22
                Tried to work through the steps but could not get it to work. Bigger issue at the moment is that I can't get the regular Homeseer Skill to work any longer. Echo responds with "Sorry I'm having problems accessing your Homeseer Skill Skill right now"

                Don't know what I did to mess this up but would like to get it fixed. Tried to disable and enable skill, restart homeseer, reboot the system but no luck.
                Regards, Bob

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                  #23
                  So I wanted to change my awake word so I wanted to edit my custom skill. But afterwards it didn't work. What's the preferred way to do this?

                  Sent from my SM-G920W8 using Tapatalk

                  Edit: Okay, after going through the edit of the skill twice, it works fine. Must have been operator error...
                  Last edited by langenet; November 2, 2016, 07:26 PM.
                  HS3PRO 3.0.0.500 as a Fire Daemon service, Windows 2016 Server Std Intel Core i5 PC HTPC Slim SFF 4GB, 120GB SSD drive, WLG800, RFXCom, TI103,NetCam, UltraNetcam3, BLBackup, CurrentCost 3P Rain8Net, MCsSprinker, HSTouch, Ademco Security plugin/AD2USB, JowiHue, various Oregon Scientific temp/humidity sensors, Z-Net, Zsmoke, Aeron Labs micro switches, Amazon Echo Dots, WS+, WD+ ... on and on.

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                    #24
                    I've created my own Skill, with the information found on this forum, so I can use something other than "HomeSeer" and it works fine.

                    However I've posted the following Feedback to Amazon requisition the addition of user defined alias for the invocation name. I have no idea if Amazon would consider this but it doesn't hurt to request it.

                    I love interacting with Echo Skills but there are times that I'd love to be able to change the invocation name to my own rather than being forced to use the one the skill builder used in the skill. Let me give you an example.

                    I run the HomeSeer automation software which can communicate with Alexa using both the Smart Home API and the HomeSeer Skill. I use both because there are many times when I need to use features that the SmartHome API can't do so then I use the HomeSeer skill. However using the invocation name "HomeSeer" is very unnatural.

                    If you follow the Alexa Skill thread on the HomeSeer forum many users feel the same way. What most of us have had to resort to is to create our own developer account and create our own skill with the invocation name we want to use and point it to the HomeSeer website. This does work but it's more than most users can handle.

                    What I would suggest is the addition of an invocation name alias field where the user can enter an optional invocation name. The original name would still functions but Alexa would also accept the alias. This way the user could, in my example case, the invocation name "HomeSeer" or their own say "the House" or "my House" or even "my Home" None of this would require any action on the part of the developer since they would still receive the response with the original invocation name and wouldn't even know the user had use the invocation name alias.
                    HomeSeer Version: HS3 Standard Edition 3.0.0.548
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