So… before the age of Home Assistant in my house, I had a custom Alexa skill hosted as an https endpoint on my computer.
You can have a look at the skill in action here.
Since I started integrating Home Assistant in my house, I had to redirect all incoming traffic with the port 443 to home assistant instead of my computer, meaning I had to shutdown my favorite and most useful Alexa skill.
Well… it made me sad and I’m sorry to say, a bit useless as well, as I had grown so accustomed to asking Alexa to open apps on my computer, I didn’t even remembered where the shortcuts are.
So I set my my mind on restoring the skill using Home Assistant, this is how I made it work:
First of all, I’ve created an mqtt client and a semi-version of my original skill, you can follow the instructions for it here.
After deploying and starting my new application I’ve updated the following configuration in home assistant:
# configuration.yaml
alexa:
intent_script:
StartAction:
action:
service: mqtt.publish
data_template:
topic: "smarthome/mqtt_client/askmypc_action"
payload: '{{ Action }}'
qos: 0
speech:
type: ssml
text: "<speak>Sure thingboss.</speak>"
On Alexa’s side, I’ve created a custom skill following the instructions here with computer as the invocation name, and the following configuration:
Intent Schema:
{
"intents": [{
"slots": [{
"name": "Action",
"type": "LIST_OF_ACTIONS"
}],
"intent": "StartAction"
}]
}
Custom Slot Type:
Type:
LIST_OF_ACTIONS
Values:
youtube
amazon developer portal
dropbox
git hub
google
calculator
excel
power point
task manager
word
gmail
facebook
excel and facebook
word and google
Sample Utterances:
StartAction open {Action}
StartAction start {Action}
The end result is I’m now able to say: Alexa, ask computer to open excel,
The request from alexa’s server will reach my home assistant which will publish excel as a payload to the topic smarthome/mqtt_client/askmypc_action.
The mqtt client running on my computer will receive the message an open excel as a desktop application.
You can see the process in action here.
