Alexa Skill not linking

balloob · September 19, 2018, 6:59am

We’ve managed to track down the issue and this should no longer occur. Let us know if you still experience account linking issues.

craig.gundlach · October 9, 2018, 4:39pm

I just received this error.

IKROWNI · March 27, 2019, 9:50pm

I’m having this issue with 0.90.1

Wladi · June 10, 2019, 2:57pm

I have this issue. HA 94.1. I am not able to connect the custom alexa skill to HA account. The temporary solution for me was to use Amazon Oauth service and to change lambda function always to use lomg term token.
How I can test/debug what is the problem? Since linking works with Amazon Oauth 2.0 but not with HA, ist must be something with HA probably.

altec · June 10, 2019, 9:30pm

Hi, I am too having the same issue, “We were unable to link Home Assistant at this time.” when trying to link custom Alexa skill to HA.
HA Version 0.94.1 on RPi 3B, in Docker on Raspbian.

MatteGary · July 7, 2019, 4:03pm

Hi I have this issue with 0.95.4.
I had previously linked Alexa with HA succesfully, but without “Send Alexa Event” enabled.
As per guide, since I have enabled it in order to have proactive mode, I had to unlink and relink Alexa to HA.
Now it keep saying
“We were unable to link Home Assistant at this time. Please try again later”

Any suggestion?

MatteGary · July 7, 2019, 4:37pm

For everyone’s sake,
I managed to get it working following this

h4nc · September 16, 2019, 5:12am

I have the same issue. I’m on 0.98.5

I use two factor authentication for HA. Should I deactivate it for linking. @petro you did this some days ok, so you have 2fa activated.

Next my amazon skill and AWD email accounts are different. Could this be a problem?

Tried it in the app and on a Mac using Safari.

Safari on my iPhone did not work yet because the popup while setting it up gets blocked.

Hope someone can help. It’s hard to fail at the last step.

petro · September 16, 2019, 11:38am

Sorry, I don’t know. I’ve never had the issue. I don’t think that the email accounts would cause the issue because there is no authentication between the lambda and skill.

trancefam · September 18, 2019, 3:08am

Hi, I had the same issue. I tried everything…disabling 2FA…creating a test account in HA…trying in all browsers and devices. I found this https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/issues/24867#issuecomment-518485667 comment about alexa not liking nonstandard ports.

My url was set up to be something like https://abc.duckdns.org:7500. I changed the port forwarding settings in my router to forward port 443 instead of 7500. Now my url is https://abc.duckdns.org. Then I updated the url in all places:

the amazon developer console to authorization/token URI
lambda baseurl
HA http base_url

Lastly I restarted HA and verified I could login normally to https://abc.duckdns.org. Then I linked the amazon skill and it worked. Hope this helps.

h4nc · September 18, 2019, 5:10am

Thanks, will try that.

@all other users that got it working, can you confirm that you use 443?

powerhouse · September 19, 2019, 1:28am

I’m also using a non standard port and it started working as soon as I exposed my HA over 443. Long term, I didn’t want to keep that setup, so I configured Alexa skill account linking to use Login with Amazon, then had the Lambda always use a Longed Live token.

NenadMilano · October 3, 2019, 9:00pm

@powerhouse can you explain how you configured “Login with Amazon” as I also struggle with the linking and do not want to change the exposed port. thanks!

Fabi3n · October 4, 2019, 11:41am

Hello, i’m french and living in France.
Your answer is the only solution that work for me ! Thank you !

Disable 2FA and others didn’t work. The only way is to forward 443 on your router or ISP Box to your Hass 8123 port.

don’t forget to do what trancefam recommand, as known :

I changed the port forwarding settings in my router to forward port 443 instead of 7500. Now my url is https://abc.duckdns.org . Then I updated the url in all places:

the amazon developer console to authorization/token URI

lambda baseurl

HA http base_url

Thx again !

powerhouse · October 5, 2019, 6:55pm

@NenadMilano I followed the steps https://github.com/mike-grant/haaska/wiki/Setting-up-haaska#set-up-login-with-amazon. Then check the “Linking Alexa Skills Kit to Login With Amazon” section

automateit · October 26, 2019, 5:56am

I’ve been using Haaska for about 3 years now, so I just want to make one point of clarification here…

The solution provided above merely enables Haaska with amazon authentication. That has always worked with a Long-lived access token (LLAT).

The problem is not with Haaska using LLAT, the problem is that the new/proposed solution in the HA documentation suggests that the updated Lambda function enables HA-native authentication and this does not appear to work. In my testing, the new script works with the LLAT but always results in the Alexa skill returning “We were unable to link ‘X’ at this time” when attempting to remove the LLAT and login via the HA UI authentication step.

Does anyone have a solution for getting the HA-native authentication to work? My testing is using the US (east) amazon region.

automateit · October 26, 2019, 6:33am

…and just like that it successfully linked, of course right after I ranted above.
Notes:
it failed the first time … literally, all I did was simply try authentication again soon after the first fail and it worked (very much to my surprise).

Other Notes:

I used my PC browser alexa portal and not my mobile device to do this.
I modified Access Token URI removing :8123 in the Alexa Development portal but I already redirect untrusted traffic over 443 to my HA on 8123 for other reasons, so I do not know for sure whether or not this had any effect on my outcome.
I left :8123 in the Authorization URI field, as HA does not respond without this.

I wish I had a more scientific explanation, but this “just worked” after a few more attempts, so I recommend trying multiple logins from the browser if you’re certain all settings are correct.

automateit · October 28, 2019, 4:45am

I just redid this setup to add Alexa custom skills integration using the more modern approach (no legacy api password).

I received the “unable to link at this time” message for this too … but after removing the port from the Access Token URI field, it worked. So if you are having an issue linking, give this a try: