I have been using Alexa with Roomie to control my home speaker system via voice. I recently converted to Alexa Plus, but Roomie is not yet compatible. Any idea on when that will happen?
We don’t have any plans for Alexa at the moment. Note that the Smart Home Skill is no longer available for new pairings as of Wednesday due to changes on the Amazon side – we expect that to continue. If you already paired it, it should work fine until somewhere around the end of this year (TBD on Amazon side).
The other Alexa Roomie Remote skill remains available indefinitely and should continue to work with any Alexa including for new pairings, but we have not looked into Alexa Plus.
After or as part of Roomie 10, the next voice feature we’ll be looking at is the significantly improved voice support in iOS 26 including farfield microphone support which is by far the most important missing aspect from the current Roomie Voice Control. Roomie Voice Control should be able to benefit greatly from that, but it is far from automatic. We will need to adopt it and that will take place somewhere in the Roomie 10 app either at release or thereafter.
Following that, if interest remains on the Alexa side, or if the real world experience of Roomie Voice Control as enhanced in iOS 26 as part of Roomie 10 isn’t as great as we hope it is, we could take a look at Alexa Plus then. Most likely that will be H1’26 as Roomie 10 will consume no doubt the rest of this year. For now, if you want to continue using Alexa, make sure you’re already paired and if necessary use the Roomie Remote skill.
Hello. I too have been using Many Alexa Echo / Wall Tablets running Alexa integrated with roomie remote . I would hope a reconsideration of supporting Alexa Again . I have a significant investment in these types of Fairfield microphone devices , and hate to have to pivot in a new “voice” direction.
I have roomie remote skill enabled, but any time I ask Alexa to run one mod my previous skills, it references that the older “Simple Control” skill is not enabled, and I am no longer able to enable this.
I realize this is not a Tech Support forum, I am just wondering one the decision to abandon Alexa. Maybe it’s a Cost issue ?, Im ignorant on how/if Alexa is monetizing the Smart Skills ?.
Voice control for me is nice, as I don’t have to have a Device in hand to initiate a routine / Activity.
So right now the Roomie Remote Remote skill is not functioning or launching any of my activities.
Thanks Will for an amazing product that we have been using for decades!
To clarify as implied in my previous message, Amazon shut down new pairings for the original Smart Home Skill API. We didn’t do anything. Our side of that is still running in case Amazon re-enabled it. But a couple weeks ago they decided to shut down new pairings for the whole API with about 3 hours notice. So there is nothing we did there, it was 100% Amazon.
It is worthy of note that good old Alexa is not as beautiful as she once was. She now does things like randomly drop APIs with 3 hours notice, or a few years ago introduce the mandatory boilerplate BS on the Roomie skill (and every other non-smart-home skill) that says something like “executing your command using the Roomie Remote skill from Roomie Remote incorporated” which is so annoying that alone it makes people not want to use normal Alexa skills. It seems clear that the Alexa team that remains after many years is basically a bunch of trained monkeys with no leader. There is only so much dedication we can pour into that given the incompetence they have displayed for many years.
Nevertheless, we do know exactly how many users and how many commands still go through Alexa into Roomie. If that number still has life in it when we next get time after Roomie 10, we probably will revisit Alexa and see what we can do there anyway.
I have a whole box, not a small one either, of Alexa devices. Having a very old investment in these things is not a reason to spend time on supporting their future. At some point many years ago, Alexa went to a bad part of town and she is just never going to be the same.
The usage on Alexa has been dropping like a rock. It is notable that unrelated ancient technologies like IR support and guide listings are not dropping anywhere near that fast. Alexa is going through a very rough time of life.
In light of this, we added Roomie Voice Control a couple years ago. It’s great if you’re right next to the device, but needs farfield and a solid notch up in recognition quality. That just so happens to be exactly what iOS 26 is bringing. So we’re hopeful.
But again, we have not abandoned Alexa, we still support it, they just turned off new pairings for one of the two APIs we use. The other one works fine modulo that boilerplate language issue some bureaucrat added a few years ago. It’s possible we can do something new with Alexa one day. But we have to look at that at this point and know that our limited available time is likely not spent wisely on a platform that has such a petulant and poor history of developer and even user support.
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Thank you … excellent explanation… I understand better now… Thanks for taking the time to explain… cheers