Alexa Voice Service Notifications with openHAB

[fabkai]

Hello everybody,

is there already a plan or the possibility to use the new Alexa Voice Service Notifications with openHAB:
https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-voice-service/reference/notifications-overview

Similar to the push notifications of myopenHAB (sendNotification(“[email protected]”, “Hello world!”))

For example, so Alexa can welcome me when my door is opened etc.

Best regards
Fabian

[fabkai]

In a small keynote at Amazon's re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, the company has now shared some interesting news. Alexa skills should now have the opportunity to use the notification system from Alexa: https://developer.amazon.com/de/blogs/alexa/post/833b9af4-26e6-47d2-a13d-bdbd9a257512/expanded-developer-preview-of-notifications-for-alexa-skills

[gdgeist]

Hoping the leadership here sees the value of visual and audible notifications from the Alexa ecosystem (echo system?). The Sonos voice sink is great but expensive at $30/echo for visual plus two way audio interaction would think this would rise higher in the priorities

[mgeramb]

You can use the amzonechocontrol binding for this. The latest beta version support SSML too.

[digitaldan]

I am going to close this as the amzonechocontrol button implements this

[gdgeist]

@digitaldan @mgeramb I use and love the amazonechocontrol binding but there were two parts of this request that the post was driving at - the Notificiation Service has visual and audible elements. Unless I missed something neither the Alexa openhab Skill or AmazonEchoControl Binding offer this currently. Should this post have been directed to that repo instead of closed?

[digitaldan]

I will re-open this issue, and if someone would like to help contribute this feature, then that would be great.

[jsetton]

Keep in mind that this feature is actually still not available to the public yet. It is currently in extended developer preview.

[jsetton]

Looks like I spoke too soon. Amazon released, back in December, the ProactiveEvents API which seems to take over the previous solution and gives the ability to send notifications from a skill.

Annoucement

API Reference

[jsetton]

So I took a closer look at this one. The ProactiveEvents API is currently very limited and doesn't give any option to just send a free form notification, at least as of yet. Ideally, having access to the initial Notification API would have been the best scenario at this point but from the fact the developer preview for this API is now closed and the couple threads I read on their developer forum, Amazon is steering the notification feature to the new limited API.

However, in the process, I came across the Notify Me skill which seems to be using the initial Notification API, probably through the developer preview program. Anyway, this skill should give the ability to push notifications from OH via webhook http calls.

[mgeramb]

Unfortunately is the notify me skill not available in the german region.
I found now a possibility to sent notifications through the alexa app api which could be integrated in the amazonechocontrol binding. But the problem here is, that alexa says “Message from (your name) for (your name)”. So it is just not perfect.