The same article goes onto quote Crestron VP John Clancy and him talking about some customised commands that with some conditional logic (for e.g. The Crestron press release talks about leveraging the Alexa Voice Service to “build voice controlled scenes”
Until recently, Amazon’s voice-activated virtual assistantĬould control individual lights and thermostats” “Those scene controls are a new trick in Alexa’s toolkit. The Cnet article and others talk about a change ,presumably to the home skills utterances allowing ‘home scenes’ in addition to lighting and heating which are currently the only supported. “increase the temperature by two degrees” The words users say to make (or invoke) those requests. Examples include:Ĭhange the dimness or brightness for a light These requests are called device directives. The architecture of the smart home skill is a less flexible version of the custom skill where API pre-defines requests and utterancesįor this type of skill, the Smart Home Skill API defines: There are two interaction skill types: Custom skill and Smart Home SkillĪ Custom skill is the fully flexible skill where the developer must define the requests the skill can handle ( intents) and the words users say to invoke those requests ( utterances). I started playing with the Alexa Skill kit back at the start of the summer but as the Alexa had not yet been released in the UK ( arriving tomorrow!) I limited my development to some minor projects discovering the architecture which is governed by Amazon. He goes on to bring on example of the big players in the market including Crestron and Lutron who “boast an Alexa integration of their own” but again we are still waiting to see what these integrations will look like.Ĭrestron : special case for Alexa Custom Skill Smart Home Skill ? Reading the Alexa Amazon keynote to the Cedia membership which seemed to trigger all the press releases Charlie Kindel ( what a great name to have working at Amazon!) says “We want to partner with all of you.” The frustration for the integrators and system designers is that the residential end users have all seen the same press releases promising slick integration but the programmers don’t know what and how they are going to deliver. Now nearly into October and now technical detail on either of the releases has been made. The announcements in the CI press at the start of September announcing Amazon Alexa partnership and Sonos partnerships started a frenzy of chatter Crestron developer community both on unofficial and official forums.