question

burnzbs asked Oct 9, '15

Invoke Custom Events for Alexa ? IP-Ranges of Amazon Cloud.

Hello, i've been wondering if there is a way to invoke custom events for Alexa. E.g. to make her say something. In my case I have a z-wave network with a motion sensor at the frontdoor. When it gets triggered i'll receive a signal through the GPIO of my raspberry, i'd like to push an event to Alexa to make her say "Ding!Dong!". Is there any possibility to do so yet ? And in addition to that i noticed that - when using HTTPS Services - you don't allow changing the ports. e.g. HTTPS://somehost:9999/ alexa.asp won't work, the cloud will still connect to the regular SSL Port at 443. It should be possible to have a custom port specified. For security reasons i would also like to have only allow the amazon cloud to reach that server but i'm not aware of the ip-ranges. Does anybody know the network ranges of amazon services connecting to the HTTPS service i've setup ? Thanks!

alexa skills kit submission testing certification

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burnzbs answered Oct 9, '15

Figured out the IP-Ranges. Can be found at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-ip-ranges.html Still looking for a way to let her say something without user action - based on events.

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Naikel answered Oct 9, '15

There's not a proper way to do that yet but take a look at this: https://forums.developer.amazon.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=8704&tstart=0

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burnzbs answered Oct 17, '15

I found a way to do it. Although the approach sucks. Basically i opened a HTTPS on my internal network to the Amazon Cloud. That way they can communicate. The only thing i really don't like is that you have to say "Alexa, tell MyApp to disable the light" instead of "Alexa, turn off the light". The pre-requirement to specify the skill should be removable.

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Naikel answered Oct 18, '15

Oh I thought you meant something like pushing phrases to Alexa without invoking a Skill. But yes I agree and that's exactly my main problem with Alexa: Invocations words NEED to be removed. Instead when a Skill is enabled in the app the utterances should have higher priority than the default utterances in Alexa. Not only this would become more friendly and people will be happier, but it actually will allow for us to override some of the default Alexa behavior to get better content (for example when I say what time is it? I want the Japan time just because).

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