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Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2016a

I made my own app and I can't even remember how to use it. I keep saying the wrong trigger word. It's my one gripe with Alexa is that the app name needs to be a prefixed.

What I want to say:

> Alexa, open the garage door

What I actually need to say

> Alexa, tell Some App Name to open the garage door

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> It's my one gripe with Alexa is that the app name needs to be a prefixed.

The thing that annoys me is when this doesn't work.

> "Alexa, play <station name as it appears in Alexa App> on Pandora"

> "I couldn't find <station name as it appears in Alexa App>, here's some crap on Amazon Music"

You know you can set the default music provider in the Alexa app, right? Setting this to Spotify allowed me to stop asking Alexa to "play X on spotify" and just say "play X" without getting bounced to Amazon music.

Yes. It doesn't help. Alexa will understand what was spoken perfectly, it shows as much in the App. Sometimes if finds the station, most of the time it doesn't. Regardless of the default music provider or the qualified "on Pandora", Alexa will fail to find the request and default to searching Prime Music.

Submit this to Amazon and they will fix it.

I try and get it to play Kiss FM UK and says a strange word and then dies. Raised it to Amazon and they are looking into it.

The dream:

    > they will fix it

The reality:

    > they are looking into it

The dream:

    > they are looking into it

The reality:

    > it's written in a ticket somewhere

I submit every card in the App, it hasn't helped yet.

Huh. I have a very high degree of confidence that I used to do exactly that, though it's been a few months since I did so. I just tried now, and it doesn't work, just like you said.

I wonder if they changed something, or my memory has tricked me. (The weird thing is not only that I remember doing it that way, but I have no memories of having any troubles with it, and this is certainly what I would do on my first try)

This is also a big gripe of mine. I created an app that can be used as a fun "neutral" third-party when instructing my toddler to do something.

What I want it to say:

> Alexa, tell %NAME% it's time (for a nap|to go to bed|to eat dinner)

What I have to say:

> Alexa, tell Toddler Boss to tell %NAME% it's time to go to bed.

It's not natural sounding at all.

Russ Hanneman?

This is what he did on HBO's Silicon Valley. It was quite..weird.

He's disrupting parenting!

Exactly! Funny you should say that... one of the first apps I tried to make was to just say "Alexa, tell [my wife's or daughter's name] I love her" and I gave up because unless I name the app with my wife's name as the app name it won't work the way I want.

Could you not create an app called %NAME% which then uses Toddler Boss?

Ha! I didn't even think about that. But it's not ideal for vertically scaling the family :)

Names are cheap... cheaper than kids anyway!

I trust to publish such an app on their store (just to go through the process...they were giving away sweatshirts). they rejected me on the grounds of targeting kids. I'm guessing you never tried to publish this?

Nah it was just a fun project to introduce myself to the platform. I'm surprised they did that to you though. I wonder if that policy will change in the future considering there's tons of apps that target kids in their app store.

How about speaking directly to your child? ;)

I guess...

Is that a intrinsic limitation or just an omission with the implementation?

I have a TP-Link Smart Switch and have their Kasa app integrated with my Echo, and all I need to do is name my switches and say things like "Alexa, [device name] on", "Alexa, turn on [device name]". So it's definitely possible for 3rd party apps to turn devices on and off with Alexa without requiring users to mention the app name.

Maybe you just need to change your app to add your garage door as a device to the Echo and use the provided on/off commands rather than register your own custom commands? I can imagine the device on/off paradigm could be limiting for certain use cases, but not for this one.

I hate this, what would "on" be for a garage door?

I have a google home, and through integration with IFTTT I can say "Okay Google open the garage door" and it will work. It's so much smoother than telling the garage to "turn on", or telling the front door to "turn off".

It's the major reason why i've stopped using and actually sold the echo but i'm getting a second home soon.

I love all of this smart home stuff, but the software developer in me cringes at the thought of some message queue connection getting messed up somewhere and my garage door going up and down 3 hours later as I lay in bed...

I've got fixes for that, mainly that it can't open from the Home when we aren't home, and it announces when the garage door opens by literally "announcing" it through the home's speaker, as well as a notification on my phone. There's also some trickery that you can do with IFTTT's activation time variable and checking how long it's been since it was "asked" to do something vs when it got to my system.

It's not for everyone, but i'm really enjoying the setup. Although if i could I would remove IFTTT from the whole equation. Everything else is running off of a server in my house, so IFTTT is the only part that's really not fully in my control.

But as it's nothing but a "layer" on top of the rest as an "ease of activation" kind of thing, i'm not that worried.

My (now sidelined/back burnered) startup's main product was kind of like an advanced IFTTT that runs on your own hardware. The major difficulty was scaling up development and production without capital, and getting a basically Turing-complete system to be easy to use.

While I would love a "self hosted" IFTTT, the biggest issue to me would be getting the integrations.

IFTTT is the ONLY thing on Google home right now that lets you create fully custom voice actions. It's got a lot of things like this.

There are a few similar services, but at the end of the day, if it's within my capability to talk directly to a service, I'm going to just write my own code to talk to it (or my FOSS HA system will more likely support it very quickly).

IFTTT's power to me is completely in its ability to integrate with otherwise "locked down" services.

> "Okay Google open the garage door"

Isn't this quite a security risk? I'm imagining a burglar standing outside with a megaphone and ordering your house to let them in.

Well considering the fact that it's pretty far away from any windows, and my condo is on the 3rd floor, couldn't they just break the glass window? Or shove the door down? Or more likely use a bump key or even easier fuck with the garage door RF "encryption" which IIRC is laughably weak.

But that aside, it's setup so that my home automation system will only listen to the voice actions if there is someone home. But that was more to prevent IFTTT bugs from opening when I'm not home.

If someone wants to go through all that trouble to break into my house, let them. I have insurance and security cameras. I'm not going to build my house like a vault to prevent someone from stealing my TV any more than I'm going to walk-around in a bullet proof vest to prevent someone from shooting me.

Edit: Sorry if this comes across a little shitty sounding. I get asked this just about every single time I bring this up. I have this response pretty loaded...

I think there's special integration for home automation. I have the same switches. Remember when you first set them up and you had to go to a special "Smart Home" section of the Alexa app? There's a special section there just for that stuff.

I'm not sure if that part is open to developers or not. It looks like it is. There's a "Get More Smart Home Skills" button that shows 59 options, so it's probably not just for the big boys.

You could set it up to say "Alexa, tell my garage to open." Not perfect, but a little better.

As someone who recently got an Echo Dot for Christmas, it seems like some apps do have this capability. For example, I paired my Sensi Thermostat, and I only need to say, "Alexa, set thermostat to 70 degrees".

Smart home functions are built-in, and not a "skill".

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