Alexa Skills

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I purchased an Amazon Echo Dot a couple weeks back. In the past I had stated that I would never put one in my house, and generally had a distain for voice activated things. I had done a little bit of reading on the Dot and I have been getting further into home automated things. I finally had a light bulb moment where I now understand all the coding. I am now dangerous. Haha.

Logically the next step was integrating Alexa with my custom build devices. All of my devices work off an ESP or Raspberry Pi (or will). I found Fauxmo Wemo emulation which is fantastic. That covers about 60% of my use, a simple off and on. But for things like my temperature sensors, hyrgrometers and water lever sensors I need to be able to pull data and have Alexa read it back. Like “Alexa, ask server for the temperature.” Or “Alexa, ask the garden for an update.” All of my devices communicate via MQTT. I started with Node-Red without Alexa so this is the direction I went. I still think it was the best route to go. All I need is an Alexa skill to read back different inbound MQTT topics (for different devices). I can’t believe there isn’t a skill already out there to read back MQTT data or homebrew temperature sensors. Or is there and I haven’t found it yet? The majority of the available Alexa skills fucking suck. There are very few actually useful skills to use. The majority of the skills I have seen are garbage. One off skills you would use once or twice then forget about. More Alexa joke skills than there needs to be.

So I started looking into making my own skill. This is what I have found to get started with creating a skill.

• You need an Amazon AWS Developer account
• You need access Lambda
• You must subscribe to basic free tier of service
• You must subscribe to Amazon EC2, which is only free for one year.

So is this a catch with using custom skills and Alexa? Will my skills then start costing me money after 12 months. If I cancel after 12 months do I lose all my skills? I’m thinking yes, I will bet you Amazon is planning on cashing in on this later? Or is it already that late in the Echo game that I am just being unfoundedly paranoid?

I have not yet created a skill. Javascript is not my forte and I haven’t sat down to dig in to this yet.

 

Some info that I found hard to find:
https://forums.developer.amazon.com/articles/45945/where-do-i-find-the-alexa-skills-kit-trigger-event.html

Great walk-through on creating a new skill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt9WdE5kR6g