Tag: echo

node-red-contrib-alexa-home-skill

It’s finally ready. I’ve been working on a Node-RED node to act on Amazon Alexa Home Skill directives since November last year. The skill was approved some time very early this morning and now should be available in the UK, US and Germany.

I’ll be mailing all the folks that have already signed up some time later today to let them know they can finally start using the skill, but for the rest of you here is a brief introduction (full details in earlier post).

Alexa Home Skill’s allow you to say the much more natural “Alexa, turn on the kitchen light” rather than “Alexa, ask Jeeves to turn on the kitchen light”, where “Jeeves” is the name of skill you have to remember. Some of the basic commands are:

  • Turn On/Off
  • Dim/Brighten
  • Set/Get Temperature
  • Lock/Unlock

With this node and service you can wire those commands to nearly anything you can control via Node-RED.

Node-RED - Alexa Smart Home Skill

You can install the node with the following commands:

cd ~/.node-red
npm install node-red-contrib-alexa-home-skill

Or via the Manage Palette option in the Node-RED editor.

If you have already installed this module please make sure you update to the latest version (0.1.13) to get the best support for all the voice commands.

There are detailed instructions on how to set everything up here.

Here is an example flow using the node. This turns a light on then automatically turns it off after 5mins. It uses the switch node to detect if it’s a request to turn the light on or off. When following the On branch it uses a trigger node to first send a payload of true then, 5 minutes later it sends false to the WeMo node.

On then Auto Off flow

This sort of flow would be great for a set of outside lights or maybe an electric heater. I also have some updates to the node-red-nodes-wemo package to make dimming/brightening by specific amounts easier, I’ll try and get them out by the weekend.

EDIT:
If you have problems with this node please do not post comments here, it really isn’t the best place to work issues. Open a issue on github here then it can be properly tracked, or ask question in #alexa on the Node-RED Slack Team.

Alexa Home Skill for Node-RED

Following on from my last post this time I’m looking at how to implement Alexa Home Skills for use with Node-RED.

Home Skills provide ON/OFF, Temperature, Percentage control for devices which should map to most home automation tasks.

To implement a Home Skill there are several parts that need to created.

Skill Endpoint

Unlike normal skills which can be implemented as either HTTP or Lambda endpoints, Home Skills can only be implemented as a Lambda function. The Lambda function can be written in one of three languages, Javascript, Python and Java. I’ve chosen to implement mine in Javascript.

For Home Skills the request is passed in a JSON object and can be one of three types of message:

  • Discovery
  • Control
  • System

Discovery

These messages are triggered when you say “Alexa, discover devices”. The reply this message is when the skill has the chance to tell the Echo what devices are available to control and what sort of actions they support. Each device section includes it’s name and a description to be shown in the Alexa phone/tablet application.

The full list of supported actions:

  • SetTargetTemperature
  • IncrementTargetTemperature
  • DecrementTargetTemperature
  • SetPercentage
  • IncrementPercentage
  • DecrementPercentage
  • TurnOff
  • TurnOn
  • GetTemperatureReading 1
  • GetTargetTemperature 1
  • GetLockState 1
  • SetLockState 1

1 These actions are listed as only available in the US at the moment.

Control

These are the actual control messages, triggered by something like “Alexa, set the bedroom lights to 20%”. It contains one of the actions listed earlier and the on/off or value of the change.

System

This is the Echo system checking that the skill is all healthy.

Linking Accounts

In order for the skill to know who’s echo is connecting we have to arrange a way to link an Echo to an account in the Skill. To do this we have to implement a oAuth 2.0 system. There is a nice tutorial on using passport to provide oAuth 2.0 services here, I used this to add the required HTTP endpoints needed.

Since there is a need to set up oAuth and to create accounts in order to authorise the oAuth requests this means that is makes sense to only do this once and to run it as a shared service for everybody (just got to work out where to host it and how to pay for it).

A Link to the Device

For this the device is actually Node-RED which is probably going to be running on people’s home network. This means something that can connect out to the Skill is probably best to allow or traversing NAT routers. This sounds like a good usecase for MQTT (come on, you knew it was coming). Rather than just use the built in MQTT nodes we have a custom set of nodes that make use of some of the earlier sections.

Firstly a config node that uses the same authentication details as account linking system to create oAuth token to be used to publish device details to the database and to authenticate with the MQTT broker.

Secondly a input node that pairs with the config node. In the input node settings a device is defined and the actions it can handle are listed.

Hooking it all together

At this point the end to end flow looks something like this:

Alexa -> Lambda -> HTTP to Web app -> MQTT to broker -> MQTT to Node-RED

At this point I’ve left the HTTP app in the middle, but I’m looking at adding direct database access to the Lambda function so it can publish control messages directly via MQTT.

Enough talk, how do I get hold of it!

I’m beta testing it with a small group at the moment, but I’ll be opening it up to everybody in a few days. In the mean time the code is all on github, the web side of all of this can be found here, the Lambda function is here and the Node-RED node is here, I’ll put it on npm as soon as the skill is public.

EDIT

The skill should now be generally available in the UK,US and Germany

Alexa Skills with Node-RED

I had a Amazon Echo Dot delivered on release day. I was looking forward to having a voice powered butler around the flat.

Amazon advertise WeMo support, but unfortunately they only support WeMo Sockets and I have a bunch of WeMo bulbs that I’d love to get to work

Alexa supports 2 sorts of skills:

  • Normal Skills
  • Home Skills

Normal Skills are triggered by a key word prefixed by either “Tell” or “Ask”. These are meant for information retrieval type services, e.g. you can say “Alexa, ask Network Rail what time the next train to London leaves Southampton Central”, which would retrieve train time table information. Implementing these sort of skills can be as easy as writing a simple REST HTTP endpoint that can handle the JSON format used by Alexa. You can also use AWS Lambda as an endpoint.

Home Skills are a little trickier, these only support Lambda as the endpoint. This is not so bad as you can write Lambda functions in a bunch of languages like Java, Python and JavaScript. As well as the Lambda function you also need to implement a website to link some sort of account for each user to their Echo device and as part of this you need to implement OAuth2.0 authentication and authorisation which can be a lot more challenging.

First Skill

The first step to create a skill is to define it in the Amazon Developer Console. Pick the Alexa tab and then the Alexa Skill Kit.

Defining a new Alexa Skill
Defining a new Alexa Skill

I called my skill Jarvis and set the keyword that will trigger this skill also to Jarvis.

On the next tab you define the interaction model for your skill. This is where the language processing gets defined. You outline the entities (Slots in Alexa parlance) that the skill will interact with and also the sentence structure to match for each Intent. The Intents are defined in a simple JSON format e.g.

{
  "intents": [
    {
      "intent": "TVInput",
      "slots": [
        {
          "name": "room",
          "type": "LIST_OF_ROOMS"
        },
        {
          "name": "input",
          "type": "LIST_OF_INPUTS"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "intent": "Lights",
      "slots": [
        {
          "name": "room",
          "type": "LIST_OF_ROOMS"
        },
        {
          "name": "command",
          "type": "LIST_OF_COMMANDS"
        },
        {
          "name": "level",
          "type": "AMAZON.NUMBER"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Slots can be custom types that you define on the same page or can make use of some built in types like AMAZON.NUMBER.

Finally on this page you supply the sample sentences prefixed with the Intent name and with the Slots marked.

TVInput set {room} TV to {input}
TVInput use {input} on the {room} TV
TVInput {input} in the {room}
Lights turn {room} lights {command}
Lights {command} {room} lights {level} percent

The next page is used to setup the endpoint that will actually implement this skill. As a first pass I decided to implement a HTTP endpoint as it should be relatively simple for Node-RED. There is a contrib package called node-red-contrib-alexa that supplies a collection of nodes to act as HTTP endpoints for Alexa skills. Unfortunately is has a really small bug that stops it working on Bluemix so I couldn’t use straight away. I’ve submitted a pull request that should fix things, so hopefully I’ll be able to give it a go soon.

The reason I want to run this on Bluemix is because endpoints need to have a SSL certificate and Bluemix has a wild card certificate for everything deployed on the .mybluemix.net domain which makes things a lot easier. (Update: When configuring the SSL section of the skill in the Amazon Developer Console, pick “My development endpoint is a sub-domain of a domain that has a wildcard certificate from a certificate authority” when using Bluemix)

Alexa Skill Flow
Alexa Skill Flow

The key parts of the flow are:

  • The HTTP-IN & HTTP-Response nodes to handle the HTTP Post from Alexa
  • The first switch node filters the type of request, sending IntentRequests for processing and rejecting other sorts
  • The second switch picks which of the 2 Intents defined earlier (TV or Lights) 
    {
  "type": "IntentRequest",
  "requestId": "amzn1.echo-api.request.4ebea9aa-3730-4c28-9076-99c7c1555d26",
  "timestamp": "2016-10-24T19:25:06Z",
  "locale": "en-GB",
  "intent": { 
    "name": "TVInput", 
    "slots": { 
      "input": { 
        "name": "input",
        "value": "chromecast"
      }, 
      "room": {
        "name": "room",
        "value": "bedroom"
      }
    }
  }
}
  • The Lights Function node parses out the relevant slots to get the command and device to control
  • The commands are output to a MQTT out node which published to a shared password secured broker where they are picked up by a second instance of Node-RED running on my home network and sent to the correct WeMo node to carry out the action
  • The final function node formats a response for Alexa to say (“OK”) when the Intent has been carried out 
    rep = {};
rep.version  = '1.0';
rep.sessionAttributes = {};
rep.response = {
    outputSpeech: {
        type: "PlainText",
        text: "OK"
    },
    shouldEndSession: true
}

msg.payload = rep;
msg.headers = {
    "Content-Type" :"application/json;charset=UTF-8"
}
return msg;

It could do with some error handling and the TV Intent needs a similar MQTT output adding.

This works reasonably well, but having to say “Alexa, ask Jarvis to turn the bedroom light on” is a little long winded compared to just “Alexa turn on the bedroom light”, in order to use the shorter form you need to write a Home Skill.

I’ve started work on a Home Skill service and a matching Node-RED Node to go with it. When I’ve got it working I’ll post a follow up with details.