[Announce] LMS-lite certified Smart Home skill for Alexa

[philchillbill]

I've just released a second and very different Alexa skill that complements MediaServer and nicely co-exists with it. Just like MediaServer, because it's a certified skill you do not need any developer or beta accounts to use it. Plus, it's free!



It's called LMS-lite and unlike MediaServer which is a custom skill, this one uses the Smart Home paradigm. While the downside of this is far fewer and more limited commands compared to MediaServer, the upside is that your LMS players all show up as smart-home devices in the Alexa app. That means they can be included in groups with other smart home devices and used in routines to do clever things like switch an amplifier on/off together with a Squeezebox. In fact, it's possible to use LMS-lite entirely from the Alexa app and never by voice !

With the Smart Home paradigm, Amazon has pre-written a bunch of voice commands to control gadgets. A skill author cannot extend or change these, but they do provide basic/useful functionality and are available for several spoken languages. There's a pool of so-called interfaces that a skill can rely on, and for this skill I've included everything that could possibly work with LMS: Alexa.PowerController, Alexa.Speaker, Alexa.PlaybackController, Alexa.PlaybackStateReporter, Alexa.RangeController, Alexa.ModeController, Alexa.ToggleController and Alexa.EndpointHealth. Check https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/d...nterfaces.html if that got you curious.

LMS-lite uses exactly the same account-linking process as the full-function MediaServer skill, where most people use ngrok as their proxy. The easy-setup procedure is explained at https://smartskills.tech/lmslitesetup but if you already have MediaServer then you will be familiar with the idea.

Once you link the skill successfully, you just say Alexa, discover devices. You should also do this any time you add or remove players. Note that Alexa will only mention a device as being 'new' the first time she sees it so if you re-discover you will be told that no new devices were found. However, whatever Squeezeboxes were found will always be visible in the Alexa app in the display category MUSIC_SYSTEM. Here's an example:





During discovery, your player names are untouched by the skill and reported as-is to Alexa (except for removing disallowed characters).

So, what commands do we have available? The following examples are for spoken English and are on an interface-by-interface basis and assuming a Squeezebox called Touch for example purposes. Once a player name has been mentioned in any of the commands, it persists until a different player is mentioned or a different music-playing skill is launched from that Echo. The examples below omitting 'Touch' in them assume that fact and will not work if no previous command recently mentioned Touch (or else Alexa will ask "Sorry, on what device?"). If in doubt, always mention the player name in the command. Each Echo has its own persisted Squeezebox too, so remember that fact if you move to another room and issue a name-free command. Don't blame/credit me for these utterances, they're Amazon's work:

Alexa.PowerController gives us power on/off.

Alexa, power ON the Touch
Alexa, power OFF the Touch
Alexa, turn ON the Touch
Alexa, turn OFF the Touch

Alexa.Speaker gives us volume control and muting.

Alexa, set Touch volume to 70
Alexa, volume 20 on Touch
Alexa, increase the Touch volume by 10
Alexa, louder
Alexa, quieter
Alexa, decrease the volume by 20
Alexa, mute the Touch
Alexa, unmute Touch

Alexa.PlaybackController gives us transport commands.

Alexa, next track on Touch
Alexa, next track
Alexa, skip this
Alexa, previous track on Touch
Alexa, previous track
Alexa, go back
Alexa, 'play' on Touch ^*
Alexa, resume Touch ^*
Alexa, pause
Alexa, stop
Alexa, rewind (not native on LMS but skips back 60 sec)
Alexa, FastForward (not native on LMS but skips ahead 60 sec)
Alexa, start-over (goes to track 1)

^*For play/resume, never leave out the player name. Otherwise a music skill will attempt to process the command instead of LMS-lite.

Alexa.RangeController gives us setting and querying the track index (first track is 1) and numbered favorites.

Alexa, track 7 on Touch
Alexa, what track is the Touch at?
Alexa, favorite 3 on Touch ^*
Alexa, preset 6 on Touch <sup>*

*</sup>With favorite/preset, you do not include the word 'Play' in the command!

Alexa.ToggleController gives us setting and querying of both loop (repeat album) and shuffle-play (shuffle by song)

Alexa, turn ON 'loop' on Touch
Alexa, activate 'loop' on Touch
Alexa, turn OFF 'loop' on Touch
Alexa, deactivate 'loop' on Touch
Alexa, is 'loop' ON, on Touch?

Alexa, turn ON 'shuffle play' on Touch
Alexa, activate 'shuffle play' on Touch
Alexa, turn OFF 'shuffle play' on Touch
Alexa, deactivate 'shuffle play' on Touch
Alexa, is 'shuffle play' ON, on Touch?

Alexa.ModeController gives us more control of both repeat and shuffle.

Alexa, set 'repeat mode' on Touch to 'OFF'
Alexa, set 'repeat mode' on Touch to 'song'
Alexa, set 'repeat mode' on Touch to 'playlist'
Alexa, set 'repeat mode' on Touch to 'album'
Alexa, what is the repeat mode on Touch?

Alexa, set 'shuffle mode' on Touch to 'OFF'
Alexa, set 'shuffle mode' on Touch to 'song'
Alexa, set 'shuffle mode' on Touch to 'playlist'
Alexa, set 'shuffle mode' on Touch to 'album'
Alexa, what is the shuffle mode on Touch?

See https://mediaserver.smartskills.tech...ml#section-6-0.

With an Alexa Routine^*, you can have a single trigger send a volley of commands to a player — much like a smart-home 'scene'. A trigger can be a self-defined voice command, time of day, or input from a sensor such as motion/contact/illuminance. Any combination of player Power (on/off), Favorite (#), Loop (on/off), Player Volume (0-100), Preset (#), Repeat Mode (off/song/album), Shuffle Mode (off/song/album), Shuffle Play (on/off), Sleep After (0-120 mins) and Track (#) can be assigned to a single trigger (see image on the left). This could be used to start playing a particular favorite at a certain volume at a pre-defined time (giving a more capable Alarm Clock than the built-in LMS one — see image on the right) or when you arrive home and your door-contact triggers.

^*In the Alexa app select Routines and under Add/edit routine, as an Action select Smart Home. Under All Devices you should see your players among your other Smart Home devices. Any parameter(s) you tick will be included in the routine with the selected value.




With smart-home skills, custom error messages are not possible. Any error(s) mentioned by Alexa with your connectivity should be taken as a prompt to check out your entire connectivity chain from cloud to player — the error text may not nail down the real issue. A disconnected player or server, for example, can result in incorrect advice to re-link the skill (which is totally unnecessary). Always check the LMS GUI to troubleshoot connectivity !

You should use the same ngrok tunnel for both LMS-lite and MediaServer. If you have any account-linking issues then it should *not* be necessary to unlink either skill just to get the other one working. Like MediaServer, LMS-lite can handle multiple LMS instances at different locations provided player names are unique.

For people who prefer minimal setup instructions without explanations, visit https://smartskills.tech/lmslitesetup/minimal.html. Otherwise see https://smartskills.tech/lmslitesetup for the full text.

[philchillbill]

[Announce] LMS-lite certified Smart Home skill for Alexa

LMS-lite is now available in French for both the fr-FR (France) and fr-CA (Canada) locales.

Alexa, avance rapide sur nom de l'appareil.
Alexa, chanson suivante sur nom de l'appareil.
Alexa, suivant sur nom de l'appareil.
Alexa, pause nom de l'appareil.
Alexa, remets la lecture sur nom de l'appareil.
Alexa, joue sur nom de l'appareil.
Alexa, précédent sur nom de l'appareil.
Alexa, reviens en arrière sur nom de l'appareil.
Alexa, recommence sur nom de l'appareil.
Alexa, arrête nom de l'appareil.

Thanks to DrMacabre for translating the skill store description at https://www.amazon.fr/smartskills-te...dp/B083H9JTJY/.

If you're in Canada and enable Multilingual Mode in your Alexa app, you can alternate between English and French commands at will. The response will automatically track the language used for the command.

New additions in Feb 2020:

If a particular player is completely powered down or otherwise off the network when you issue a command to it, the error returned is now ENDPOINT_UNREACHABLE which should have Alexa tell you that that specific device is offline, please check its power supply and connection.

New in July 2020:

Thanks to the translation efforts of strict20, the skill is now available with German language support for the DACH countries. You can find it at https://www.amazon.de/smartskills-te.../dp/B083H9JTJY
If you say "Alexa, speak English and German" then you can alternate between issuing commands in both languages with the skill.

Alexa, spule auf dem Gerät vor.
Alexa, nächstes Lied auf dem Gerät.
Alexa, geh auf dem Gerät nach vorne.
Alexa, pausiere Gerät.
Alexa, Gerät fortsetzen.
Alexa, spiele Gerät ab.
Alexa, gehe auf Gerät zurück.
Alexa, spule auf Gerät zurück.
Alexa, Gerät neustarten.
Alexa, stoppe Gerät.

New in November 2020:

Numerical favorites and presets can be requested

New in February 2021

Easy-setup — ngrok configuration and autostart is now fully automated

New in March 2021

Player Volume can now be set from within Alexa Routines. Also, requesting numerical favorites now handles nesting/sub-folders

New in Sept 2021

Retrieving favorites no longer has to be a recursive activity so timeouts with large collections should no longer occur.

New in July 2022

Added Alexa.PlaybackStateReporter interface.
Implemented EXPIRED_AUTHORIZATION_CREDENTIAL for abandoned ngrok URLs. This causes the skill to be unlinked to prevent infinite discovery requests to the skill's back-end that will never succeed and hence just waste bandwidth.
Migrated ngrok-lookup (via uuid) to DynamoDB for lower latency

New in August 2022
LMS-lite is now available in both Spanish and Italian.

New in January 2023
Alexa Routines now support the Sleep After 0-120 mins functionality

[slartibartfast]

LMS is so awesome, it deserves more than just one certified Alexa skill to control it. That's why I've released a second and very different skill that complements MediaServer and nicely co-exists with it. Just like MediaServer, because it's a certified skill you do not need any developer or beta accounts to use it.

[ATTACH]28917[/ATTACH]

It's called LMS-lite and unlike MediaServer which is a custom skill, this one uses the Smart Home paradigm. While the downside of this is far fewer and more limited commands compared to MediaServer, the upside is that there's never a need for an invocation name (so commands are shorter), plus, your LMS players show up as smart-home devices in the Alexa app. That means they can be included in groups with other smart home devices and used in routines to do clever things like switch an amplifier on/off together with a Squeezebox. LMS-lite is also free, and will be available (soon) in languages other than English.

With the Smart Home paradigm, Amazon has pre-written a bunch of voice commands to control Smart Home gadgets. A skill author cannot extend or change these, but they do provide basic/useful functionality and are available for several languages. There's a pool of so-called interfaces that a skill can declare an endpoint/device to support during device discovery. For this skill, I've included everything from this (current) arsenal that could possibly work with LMS: Alexa.PowerController, Alexa.Speaker, Alexa.PlaybackController, Alexa.RangeController, Alexa.ModeController, Alexa.ToggleController and Alexa.EndpointHealth. The reason I'm listing all this here is so that you can go check the Amazon docs on those interfaces if you want further information: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/d...nterfaces.html

LMS-Lite uses exactly the same account-linking process as the full-function MediaServer skill, where most people use ngrok for external accessibility and encryption/password-protection. Because it's a Smart Home skill, with LMS-Lite you must immediately account-link during enablement. The howto is at https://smartskills.tech/lmslitesetup but if you already have MediaServer then you will be familiar with the idea.

Once you link the skill successfully, you just say Alexa, discover devices. She will do a round-robin with all of your Smart Home skills and all your gadgets will be reported by their associated skills. LMS-Lite will add all your LMS players, so Alexa should tell you that there are some new devices. She may name a few informatively, but that's up to Amazon - with Smart Home skills, the skill itself never determines what Alexa says. If you subsequently discover devices she will not mention any new LMS devices as they are already known. Any changes to player names and/or deleting players is done in the Alexa app under Devices.

During discovery, your player names are untouched by the skill and reported as-is to Alexa. If you have unspeakable player names like Onkyo-XTR672VMK, well, good luck with getting her to understand them because you cannot abbreviate much. However, you can rename players textually in the Alexa app, which is a nice side-effect of their showing up there. It's probably smart to tack on ' player' to the end of each device name if you are using room-based naming in your house. Otherwise you risk being told that 'More than one device(s) share that name, which one do you want?', every time you issue a control directive. At a minimum, split concocted names like 'rearupstairsbedroomtouch' into a few separate words - this is after all voice control and not UI navigation. But unlike with MediaServer, there's no preference for a room barename as basis. You are free to call your players anything that can be reasonably enunciated. Yaay!

So, what commands do we have available? The following examples are for English and are on an interface-by-interface basis and assuming a Squeezebox called Touch for example purposes. Once a player name has been mentioned in any of the commands, it persists until a different player is mentioned or a different music-playing skill is launched from that Echo. The examples below omitting 'Touch' in them assume that fact and will not work if no previous command recently mentioned Touch. If in doubt, always mention the player name in the command. Each Echo has its own persisted Squeezebox too, so remember that fact if you move to another room and issue a name-free command. Don't blame/credit me for these utterances, they're Amazon's work:

Alexa.PowerController gives us power on/off.
Examples:

Alexa, power ON the Touch
Alexa, power OFF the Touch
Alexa, turn ON the Touch
Alexa, turn OFF the Touch
etc.

Alexa.Speaker gives us volume control and muting.
Examples:

Alexa, set Touch volume to 70
Alexa, volume 20 on Touch
Alexa, increase the Touch volume by 10
Alexa, pump up the volume
Alexa, pump it up
Alexa, louder
Alexa, make it louder
Alexa, louder please
Alexa, quieter
Alexa, tone it down
Alexa, lower the volume
Alexa, decrease the volume by 20
Alexa, mute the Touch
Alexa, unmute Touch
etc.

Alexa.PlaybackController gives us transport commands.
Examples:

Alexa, next track on Touch
Alexa, next
Alexa, skip this
Alexa, previous track on Touch
Alexa, previous
Alexa, go back
Alexa, play on Touch
Alexa, resume on Touch
Alexa, pause
Alexa, stop
Alexa, start-over (goes to track 1)
(note that play/resume can misbehave and kick off your most recent stream-to-Echo from another Music skill instead of sending a Smart Home command to LMS - it all depends on your recent history of commands)

Alexa.RangeController gives us setting and querying the track index (first track is 1).
Examples:

Alexa, track 7 on Touch
Alexa, song 9 on Touch
Alexa, what track is the Touch at?
Alexa, what track is the Touch on?

Alexa.ToggleController gives us setting and querying of both loop (repeat album) and shuffle-play (shuffle by song)
Examples:

Alexa, turn ON 'loop' on Touch
Alexa, activate 'loop' on Touch
Alexa, turn OFF 'loop' on Touch
Alexa, deactivate 'loop' on Touch
Alexa, is 'loop' ON, on Touch?

Alexa, turn ON 'shuffle play' on Touch
Alexa, activate 'shuffle play' on Touch
Alexa, turn OFF 'shuffle play' on Touch
Alexa, deactivate 'shuffle play' on Touch
Alexa, is 'shuffle play' ON, on Touch?

Alexa.ModeController gives us more control of both shuffle and repeat.
Examples:

Alexa, set 'repeat mode' on Touch to 'OFF'
Alexa, set 'repeat mode' on Touch to 'song'
Alexa, set 'repeat mode' on Touch to 'playlist'
Alexa, set 'repeat mode' on Touch to 'album'
Alexa, what is the repeat mode on Touch?

Alexa, set 'shuffle mode' on Touch to 'OFF'
Alexa, set 'shuffle mode' on Touch to 'song'
Alexa, set 'shuffle mode' on Touch to 'playlist'
Alexa, set 'shuffle mode' on Touch to 'album'
Alexa, what is the shuffle mode on Touch?

To control a player in an Alexa routine, in the Alexa app select routines and under add/edit routine, as an action select Smart Home. Under All Devices you should see your players among your other Smart Home devices. If you select one of your players, you will see the options for Power, Loop, Repeat Mode, Shuffle Mode, Shuffle Play and Track. Under each of those will be options like On/Off or Off/Track/Album, and, for Track, a slider to set a value from 1 to 200. You can specify more than one category and have them all triggered at once when that action runs. Note that if you have no recognized event-triggering devices such as door contacts or motion sensors, you may not see any Smart Home devices under actions. In that case, you can still add the players to groups so they at least power on/off with the other devices in the group, although you then have less settings options than in routines.

[ATTACH]28918[/ATTACH]

If you have any connectivity errors with your proxy, such as bad or expired cert, upstream proxy issues, ngrok tunnel killed or invalid, auth details wrong, etc, then Alexa will issue a standard Amazon warning message based on the BRIDGE_UNREACHABLE error which the skill returns for an unresponsive LMS. Because there cannot be a custom and more detailed/specific error message, you should assume if you get that standard message that your proxy or LMS itself is down and that, at a minimum, you need to troubleshoot your full cloud-to-LMS connectivity chain.

In my testing, Toggle and Mode controllers are a both still flaky but Range is rock solid (all 3 are relatively new capabilities). Amazon still has some work to do. The other stuff is bulletproof.

My next step is to get it available in languages other than English. Should be coming soon !

This sounds exactly what I need to turn off my Touch at the same time as my smart socket connected amplifier. Brilliant.

Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

[castalla]

Enabled.

Looking good so far!

Thanks.

[slartibartfast]

When I try to enable using the the same tunnel as for Media Server and same credentials I get

Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

[philchillbill]

Nothing I can do about that. Try again. Skill linking can be hit and miss at times.

EDIT: Fixed. This was later found to be a totally random but persistent issue dependent on the particular Amazon server than happened to handle a user's account linking. It was permanently fixed by escaping the URL parameters returned by the oauth server. Depending on patch-level and also locale, some Amazon servers had issues with this while others did not.

[slartibartfast]

Nothing I can do about that. Try again. Skill linking can be hit and miss at times.

So it is OK to use the same tunnel etc?

[slartibartfast]

Nothing I can do about that. Try again. Skill linking can be hit and miss at times.

Tried lots of times. It validates OK but Submit doesn't work.

Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

[philchillbill]

Tried lots of times. It validates OK but Submit doesn't work.

Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

It should work fine. Amazon tested it hundreds of times during certification with the same credential as for MediaServer. You don’t have an extra ‘/‘ in the path this time or some such?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[slartibartfast]

It should work fine. Amazon tested it hundreds of times during certification with the same credential as for MediaServer. You don’t have an extra ‘/‘ in the path this time or some such?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

No. Validation works so it seems to be happy with the tunnel. When I deliberately put wrong credentials in it would not validate. Could it be because I left the ngrok region as US? Clutching at straws now.

Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

[philchillbill]

I doubt it, honestly. But it may be worth seeing if that's it. There are no errors at all in the logs and I just disabled and re-enabled myself to check and that went fine so the oauth server is functioning.

EDIT: What platform are you linking from, desktop or mobile? Maybe try it from an alternative.

[slartibartfast]

I doubt it, honestly. But it may be worth seeing if that's it. There are no errors at all in the logs and I just disabled and re-enabled myself to check and that went fine so the oauth server is functioning.

I disabled the Media Server skill then enabled and linked it. Then I tried to enable LMS-lite and it worked. No idea why. [emoji3]

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

[philchillbill]

I disabled the Media Server skill then enabled and linked it. Then I tried to enable LMS-lite and it worked. No idea why. [emoji3]

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

Great! Trust me, the notions of 'no idea why' and 'Amazon' fit together far more often than one would think/hope

The thing about a smart home skill is that far more is done by Amazon outside the skill code and therefore beyond the control of the skill author. So there was actually nothing much I could do to help in this case. Some weird happenings also seem to be linked to a user's account and not the skills themselves. Even Amazon has no idea why. My own account is jinxed in that I cannot trigger any skills from a routine. I have a brilliant skill idea that I cannot test from my own account because of this. It will take months to resolve, unfortunately.

Let me know how the amp/Touch simultaneous power commands work out for you.

[slartibartfast]

Great! Trust me, the notions of 'no idea why' and 'Amazon' fit together far more often than one would think/hope

The thing about a smart home skill is that far more is done by Amazon outside the skill code and therefore beyond the control of the skill author. So there was actually nothing much I could do to help in this case. Some weird happenings also seem to be linked to a user's account and not the skills themselves. Even Amazon has no idea why. My own account is jinxed in that I cannot trigger any skills from a routine. I have a brilliant skill idea that I cannot test from my own account because of this. It will take months to resolve, unfortunately.

Let me know how the amp/Touch simultaneous power commands work out for you.

I just tried creating s group containing my Touch and amplifier and turning off the group works. I also added the Touch to my Goodnight routine alongside the amplifier and some lights and that also works. This is what I expected to be possible when Amazon allowed skills to be used in routines. Great work.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

[philchillbill]

I just tried creating s group containing my Touch and amplifier and turning off the group works. I also added the Touch to my Goodnight routine alongside the amplifier and some lights and that also works. This is what I expected to be possible when Amazon allowed skills to be used in routines. Great work.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

Good stuff! As a privileged developer, I have access to some preview stuff that has yet to roll out to all devs. In theory, I can have both MediaServer and LMS-lite install together and account-link together by creating what's called a multi-model skill. Except that Smart Home is simply not allowed in skills with subscriptions. So I decided not to wait any longer and just release a standalone Smart Home skill. I had this all working for myself a year ago, but back then I had no idea how to scale it for other users. ngrok was a game-changer, plus my own oauth server I wrote myself. Now I can copy/paste those concepts for all my skills and that's why LMS-lite was very doable.

One more thing I might do is make LMS-lite a combo Video/Smart-Home skill. That way, I could add Alexa.SeekController so you could say 'Alexa, go back 12 seconds' to repeat a guitar solo, for example. It's already handled in MediaServer with custom commands, but it would be cool to get it working here too. Just for the hell of it.