Alexa

Forum Features
1

Are there any plans to have a smart
Home skill?

Thanks
Paul

2

These are not useful right now. One day when the Smart Home Skill APIs improve to handle concepts other than very basic lights, then certainly we will consider having both a Skill and a Smart Home Skill. For now, the Smart Home skills are a very small subset of real Skills with no functionality other than turn on a light or set a thermostat. As an example of many limitations, you can’t even get the thermostat value. This is very early days for the Smart Home API and we look forward to its future enhancements. Meanwhile, our real Skill provides access to large amounts of functionality.

A quicker “fix”, rather than the likely years it will require Amazon to enhance the Smart Home API to the point we would need for it to be a suitable replacement for their main Skills API, is to allow the Alexa user to designate a “default skill”, effectively moving all of the verbs from a particular skill into pole position so you could drop “tell Simple Control” from commands.

Combined with the need for the Skills API to identify the specific Alexa device from which a command originated (to allow automatic determination of the room), those two minor enhancements could be implemented far more quickly than long term architectural enhancements to the Smart Home API which would be very complex to support our 30 different device categories, activities, and many other things we would need that are not conceived of in the Smart Home API, but are largely already available in our current Skill.

Thank you.

3

I also want to mention for anyone reading this who wants to rely on simple sync (like myself) for various features including echo, go with the hub. I had a samsung galaxy tab 4 which had various issues with simple sync. Its only been two days but i can already tell the hub is working quicker and so far has resolved all my issues that i had previously with the tab 4. Pinching myself for not ponying up the money right away (I was on the fence) and went with an android tablet sadly.

4

I have Alexa working with Simple Hub On my Apple TV, but I’m having a strange problem.

If I have Simple Remote open on my iPhone, and say “Alexa tell simple control to watch Tivo” Alexa will change the iPhone Simple control interface to TiVo, but will not actually run the Watch TiVo commands, to set up the TV, receiver, etc.

If I don’t have Simple Remote running on my phone Alexa properly sets up my TV, reciever and Tivo.

Am I doing something wrong? does Alexa only work if the Iphone app is not running? if so why?

5

That’s not likely related to Alexa support. What you’re seeing is a device in your configuration (likely your receiver) is a single-connection device. Thus your iPhone and Hub are conflicting. Lots of ways to resolve that, these kinds of things should go to support.

This is the knowledgebase article dealing with some common cases of that:

simplecontrol.com/knowledge … e-devices/

Thank you.

7

I prefer to use the Simple Control Custom Skill so this would be great. Did it ever get implemented? If so, how to I set Simple Control to be the Default Alexa Skill?