When will Toggle and Mode controller actually support locales other than en-US?

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Curtis Cooper asked Oct 23, '19

When will Toggle and Mode controller actually support locales other than en-US?

In https://developer.amazon.com/docs/device-apis/resources-and-assets.html under the Label object, value, a TextString object can be passed in. In the locale field description it says "Currently, the only supported value is en-US."

Please tell me how we are supposed to launch skills in other locales that use the Toggle and Mode Controllers if there is no support for the command names? All I need is for other English speaking countries to be able to use this, why is this so hard? It's been a year.

alexa alexa smart home

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Answer 1 · 2019-10-26T15:09:07Z

Jeremy answered Oct 26, '19

Any chance someone from Amazon can comment on this? The documented list of supported locales is stating that the Toggle, Mode, and Range building block APIs have been extended to additional Alexa Locales. However, from my testing using the Alexa Simulator, it doesn't seem to be the case.

To add to OP, label asset names from the global catalog are also not working. A simple endpoint with a ToggleController interface and friendly names set to label asset name "Alexa.DeviceName.Washer" would work fine, when asking "turn on the washing machine", in en-US, but would not be recognized in en-CA.

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Answer 2 · 2019-11-01T15:15:45Z

Amazon_Bernardo Bezerra answered Nov 1, '19

Hello @Curtis Cooper and @jesapps and thanks for your interest.

We do not comment on the roadmap of features. I can only suggest you keep an eye open in our blogs for new announcements.

In the meantime, you can also add these feature requests to our Uservoice page over here.

Regards,
Barry

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Curtis Cooper commented · Nov 01, 2019 at 09:34 PM

This is a feature that was just recently announced to support other locales, and it doesn't. Read @jesapps answer above, the list of supported locales includes en-CA but the reality is that it only supports en-US.

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Jeremy commented · Nov 02, 2019 at 02:06 PM

@barry@amazon Thanks for getting back to us. The question is related to the Alexa Skill API documentation indicating that the Toggle, Mode, and Range building block APIs have been extended to additional Alexa Locales, while it doesn't seem to be the case.

I understand that you don't comment on future functionalities availability but if these aren't available yet, why update your documentation in the first place? I have had many of my international skill users point to your documentation asking why my skill isn't supporting this change.

As much as you have to manage your users expectation, I and mostly likely @Curtis Cooper have to do the same with our users. So it would be much appreciated that you can clarify our question and, if necessary, update your documentation accordingly in the event that this feature is not available as of yet.

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Amazon_Bernardo Bezerra ♦♦ Jeremy commented · Nov 04, 2019 at 03:37 PM

Hi @Curtis Cooper and @jesapps,

Looking at the documentation en-CA does not show up as one of the supported locales:

Please let me know if this is different than what you are seeing or experiencing.

Regards,
Barry

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Curtis Cooper Amazon_Bernardo Bezerra ♦♦ commented · Nov 04, 2019 at 04:46 PM

wow... ok, guess we'll wait

Thanks for clarifying

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Answer 3 · 2019-11-06T10:37:26Z

Phil McGee answered Nov 6, '19

I've discovered something really odd. I recently got Toggle and Mode working just fine in an existing en-US skill and the functionality worked as advertised. However, after adding the interfaces, I noticed that discovery silently failed for NEW devices not already present in my account. After deleting all my account devices, nothing at all could be discovered while those interfaces were present in ANY endpoint. With the code commented out, all is fine for discovery. Very odd, because adding the interfaces and re-discovering DID add the interfaces to the endpoints in question and the functionality DID work. So appending an existing discovery seemed ok, but any new discovery is blocked. I've reported it via direct contact to Amazon but thought I'd mention it here in case anybody is scratching their heads with a similar issue.

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Jeremy commented · Nov 07, 2019 at 05:32 PM

I ran into the same issue with ModeController if only one mode is specified in the supported list. It seems that a minimum of two is required although this is not documented. Same issue with EqualizerController if sending an empty array as supported modes.

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Phil McGee Jeremy commented · Nov 09, 2019 at 01:06 PM

In my case, it was that I re-used an instance name across two different controller types (Mode and Toggle). I was using commands for both "Turn on Shuffle" and "Set shuffle mode to Song" and I called them both LMS.shuffle at instance level. This caused the entire discovery to fail..

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