How to request status of a device

[DevinH]

I can turn the office light on and off just fine, but I can't get the status of it.

"Alexa, ask the house for the status of the office light"
response
"That command was not found on the device"

That's the verbiage I used for requesting status on the previous Homeseer skill and it always worked. Has this changed? I took a look through the voice recognition docs and didn't see anything about requesting status.

[DevinH]

I can turn the office light on and off just fine, but I can't get the status of it.

"Alexa, ask the house for the status of the office light"
response
"That command was not found on the device"

That's the verbiage I used for requesting status on the previous Homeseer skill and it always worked. Has this changed? I took a look through the voice recognition docs and didn't see anything about requesting status.

I figured it out. Looks like I have to use the phrase

"Alexa, ask the house to get the status of the office light"

I guess things are a little more strict now that we're not defining our own utterances.

Question... is it possible to combine some of the old skill schema and sample utterance stuff with the new skill schema? For example, if wanted to use verbiage that homeseer doesn't understand using the new text parsing stuff, I should be able to set that up the old way in the same skill, right?

[Sgt. Shultz]

All of the old schema code still works if you wish to use it, we're just not going to be adding to it or modifying it anymore.

You'll have to experiment with it to see how the echo will interact with the different schema approaches.

I will look at the code to see about making the status request accept requests that are more like the original skill as well as the current phrasing.

[DevinH]

All of the old schema code still works if you wish to use it, we're just not going to be adding to it or modifying it anymore.

You'll have to experiment with it to see how the echo will interact with the different schema approaches.

I will look at the code to see about making the status request accept requests that are more like the original skill as well as the current phrasing.

That would be great. My brain is so used to giving commands in a slightly different way. In the mean time, I'll take a stab at combining the schema approaches and see what happens.

[Sgt. Shultz]

The next release should fix your concerns.

[DevinH]

The next release should fix your concerns.

Great to hear, thanks! Can you give a summary of what's changed so I know what to test?

I tried combining schemas and it it did not work out to well. I put both the ParseText and DeviceStatus intents in the schema and it would not use the ParseText intent at all. Any attempt at turning a light on or off would instead give me the status of the light. I kind of assumed something like that would happen.

[Sgt. Shultz]

I modified the parameters to allow for the phrase 'Ask HomeSeer for the status of...'

You should also check out the ECHO API app, as well as using the talking process of the HSClient on your Phone.

With either of these, you can eliminate the 'Ask Homeseer to...' portion of the phrase.