I am building an Alexa instructional exercise skill using the Alexa Skill Set SDK on nodejs. I am saving each cooking step to the DB, therefore if the skill times out, the user can reopen the skill and continue where they left off.
Problem is that users are annoyed that they have to keeping reopening the skill, people work at different speeds, is it possible to keep the skill open or increase the time out whilst I wait for the user to complete the step and then say "Alexa, next step"?
I tried increasing the lambda timeout, it made no difference.
I have been trying to do this for quite awhile. There have been several responses on the Amazon developer forums from folks at Amazon (for example, this response) that state that the approximate 8-10 second timeout is not configurable.
The following solution is bit of a hack and not recommended, but may serve your purpose.
Just modify your response like below:
<speak>
Tell recipe step here.
<audio src="<-- Hosted silent mp3 file URL -->" />
</speak>
You can add a silent mp3 file in your response. Your skill will be on for the time of that mp3 file.
But to interrupt Alexa in the mid of this response, user will have to say Alexa, next step instead of Next step.
There is API you could call to provide progressive response
Related
Stack: Nextjs, expressjs, socket.io, WebRTC
I'm trying to build a video chat, at the moment everything works fine only if the second user joins and agrees to use the camera and has one at all.
Otherwise, the connection is established, a chat is available between two users, but user 2 does not receive the video stream of user 1.
I put this code on github for more clarity and a better understanding of what is happening.
Very big cosmic thanks for help!
You are calling createOffer without the "legacy" offerToReceive* constraints. Without these, if the user creating the offer does not have a camera they will only negotiate audio and not attempt to negotiate video.
See https://webrtc.github.io/samples/src/content/peerconnection/pc1/ for a sample using those options.
I have a problem with Amazon Alexa.
I have started to develop a small skill in Alexa Developer Console.
Everything works perfectly when I test it in that console, but when I tell to Alexa device to open my skill. It tell me "I don't know about that".
I don't understand why, the email address is the same for the Developer Console and for the device. I'm sure that the invocation is correct. I tried to disable and enable the skill from the AlexaApp, but it still doesn't work.
Any ideas? Thank you!
It could be an internal recognition issue from the invocation name.
What I recommend you to do:
Change the invocation name by something very simple ex: Test four
Save the model and Build the model
Try open Test four in the developer console
Try open Test four on the device
If open Test four doesn't work on the device, relogin on the Alexa app with the same email as the developer console and resync the device. Make sure the app is enabled.
If it work with test four it means that the invocation name you choosed previously is not properly recognized by Alexa. You should keep it as simple as possible or ask the support to improve the recognition of it.
I am currently in development mode for the skill. It is using Lambda endpoint. The skill is working in https://developer.amazon.com/alexa/console/ask/test/
When I sent invites for Beta testing and followed the Beta testing instructions on a different (email account with Alexa), the application is giving “Unexpected communication issue: There was a problem communicating with the requested skill”
Request identifier: amzn1.echo-api.request.[some-id]
I am not getting any logs in CloudWatch for my Lambda function
[Update] More info:
The skill is available in all countries and regions where Amazon distributes skills.
This is a dummy skill, with only one intent, triggered by a command like this Alexa open mySkill and tell me a new fact, after which the control passes on to Lambda function which selects a fact string randomly from an array.
Solved it finally. The problem was mainly due to 2 reasons:
I had created multiple skills (for testing) and didn't noticed that
they had similar invocation words (silly me :/ ). One of them was
pointing to an older AWS account. Thanks #ChuckLaPress for the hint.
Language settings. I had used the default en-US language and was trying from India. Solved it by including support for all other english languages. Details here.
I have been into alexa development and recently I have encountered a never before situation. While trying to enable testing on a new skill, I am getting the following error on the test tab :
There was a failure enabling your skill, please try again.
I know that this might happen if I do not complete the previous steps such skill information, interaction model, configuration etc. But the strange thing is that i have completed all of the above steps. My skill has :
A valid skill name
It has valid intents, slots and sample utterrances in my interaction
model
I have successfully saved and built my interaction model
I have provided valid end-points ARN of my AWS lambda function, which has
alexa-skill-kit enabled with the skill-id of my skill, in the configuration tab.
I don't think I have missed any of the requirement as it shows green tick(successful completion) on all mentioned steps before testing. But I can not enable the test stimualtaor in the test tab. It throws the above mentioned error message.
Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks!!
Go to the "build" tab in your Alexa Skill page. On the right side, you will find "Skill Builder Checklist". Make sure that all steps in the checklist are completed.
Thanks
Visit the invocation tab in Alexa Skill Kit Developer console. All Skill builder checklist have to be complete to start the test.
Don't forget to build your skill before run test.
In EndPoint -> click Save Endpoints, if it successful then in Test, you can see Test is enabled for this skill ( in blue color).
I have questions related pushing messages to a user.
Here is the use-case.
A user is walking inside a wifi enabled warehouse and we would like to use the glasses to send critical information and warnings about the components in that building which required the user to interact with the component(s).
We have used push notifications in android devices with ok results, but with a live hud I would like faster updates.
Basically we will send something like this to the user
{
"html": "<article>\n <section>\n <strong class=\"red\">ALERT </strong>13:10 device ABCD tolerance failure. \n </p>\n </section>\n</article>\n",
"notification": {
"level": "DEFAULT"
}
}
How quickly can we get the information to the device?
What is the update rate? If we see an alert from a machine can, how quickly can we refresh the user of its status.
Is there some type of flood protection that would cause us grief?
I assume native api will have more options, such as polling or some type of custom subscription service which we could use for faster updates than google's service. Is this correct?
Thanks
Nick
This is not something that is expected to be done with the Mirror API. The GDK is where you would want to do this and they are taking feature requests. You might want to add your use case to this thread:
https://code.google.com/p/google-glass-api/issues/detail?can=2&start=0&num=100&q=&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Priority%20Owner%20Component%20Summary&groupby=&sort=&id=75
To answer some of your other questions:
1 - Mirror API card pushes happen within seconds
2 - Seconds
3 - You are currently limited to 1000 card pushes a day per developer account, so that would be shared across all your users
4 - Curently there is no supported way to do that
As a final thought, if you really want to do this without official support, you could watch this video which shows you how to run "normal" android apk's on Glass. It is a presentation from Google I/O 2013:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPethpwuYEk