Alexa, do what I want!

Anyway, we very often had ideas of things we would want Alexa to do for us. But, … there is no Skill for let her doing it, … or the appropriate Skill is weird, bad, not yet fully implemented or what else, … or the things Alexa should do are only reachable within the local network, … and so on.

To be honest, we do think that around 90% of the existing Skills for Alexa are simply useless. Seriously, if you do want a RSS reader to read you the news, then simply do that. No need to install a Skill for every single newspaper or other medium you are consuming.

Like many things we were unhappy with before, we started to implement a solution into OTDT.

Now it is possible to connect your Amazon Echo account to OTDT where you then would receive Player states as well as notifications about every activity Alexa does and use them as a Trigger (the “this”).

Don’t get me wrong. We are not talking about switching devices. This is done using the Philips Hue protocol where you would be much, much more flexible with the commands saying to Alexa for switching or controlling things.

We are talking about own commands without the need to install a special Skill.

You would simply need to create an empty routine in the Alexa App. Ok, you would not need to do that, things would work even without; but without that empty routine Alexa would play a negative notification tone when triggering the command.

Say you define an empty Routine named “Status Report” in the Alexa App and then define a trigger in OTDT for “PUSH_ACTIVITY” with the script “(value.description.summary == 'status report') && value.activityStatus == 'SUCCESS'” as the transformation.

You would then have actions (the “that”) triggered on OTDT when saying “Alexa, Status Report” to your Amazon Echo.

Now, we are very, very curious about what ideas you will implement with that.