ANNOUNCE: Alexa voice control (development thread)

[short_y]

I've had Squeezeboxen pretty much since Slimdevices started. Bought my first one directly from them and drove to their HQ to pick it up since they were just down the road from me in Sunnyvale, Since then I've added two more (Radio and a V3) and am using my new Clazio speaker as a player. I much prefer to use my Echo and my Google Home to control my devices and I'd love to be able to do the same with my SB players.

[wtnh]

Hi - longtime Squeezebox user here. I recently built an RPi 3 piCorePlayer with an Allo Boss DAC and RPi "official" display. Also running LMS on this setup, having migrated LMS and music library off of my Ubuntu server box.

Would love to have Alexa control over this setup. I have some linux skills and development experience.

Thanks!

[MeSue]

I PM'd you the other day. Have a Dot and adding two Echoes tomorrow.

Using Harmony Hub + Alexa to control the two Radios in one room but would be even better to directly control it all with Alexa.

[Tunes0710]

Hiya.
I currently have LMS set up on one of my VMs within my server cluster and then multi-room audio set up with Rpi's and various windows machines.
I recently purchased an Amazon Echo, and would very much like to test out this skill and help with the development (through testing and bug reports).

Cheers,
Dave.

[Martin5130]

Hello,

I'm interested and would be very glad to become a tester of the alpha version.

I got several devices, (touch and radio radio).

Device-Names
Wohnzimmer
Schlafzimmer
Küche
Gästezimmer
Bad

Thank you!

[meep]

Hi to bondsc, short_y, wtnh, MeSue, Tunes0710, Martin5130

Many thanks for getting in touch and offering to help test.

Apologies for the slow response,. I've been on hols and staying well away from computers and the interweb! Getting back to hab-tunes this week though so stay tuned for updates.

Some of you have been in touch via PM already but if not, to get you set up when we're ready for beta, I'll need the email address you use for your amazon account / echo. If you have a high enough post count on these forums, please send me a PM with this detail. If you cannot PM, send by email to admin at hab-tunes dot com.

Great to see ongoing interest in the project. Hopefully we'll get v1.0 wrapped fairly soon.

Peter

[fondoftri]

Hi Meep,
I test and develope a few apps within my automated home set on Fibaro and Amazon's Alexa Echo. I would like to participate in testing your great skill too, perhaps I bring something worth to it.
Looking forward to take a part in your great work.
Best regards, Mariusz.

[Patricia P]

Hi meep, I don't have a dot, but I am trying the reverb app on my iPad air 2 and it is registered as a device for the iOS Alexa app. Currently I just use it with exercise and quiz skills but I'd like to control my squeezebox server by voice.

I have a radio and squeezebox classic in use every day.

Patricia

[Simon_rb]

Got this working today and its pretty good. I'm not sure if I am meant to mention here or in the teamworks.

Wondered if syncing/unsycing of players and whole groups will be an option in the future.

Also will we be able to ask it to play albums or songs from our library eventually. I imagine the latter to be rather difficult to implement. (I see a mention of future version?!? )

Many thanks for all your hard work and for the opportunity to help test.

[meep]

Got this working today and its pretty good. I'm not sure if I am meant to mention here or in the teamworks.

Wondered if syncing/unsycing of players and whole groups will be an option in the future.

Also will we be able to ask it to play albums or songs from our library eventually. I imagine the latter to be rather difficult to implement. (I see a mention of future version?!? )

Many thanks for all your hard work and for the opportunity to help test.

Hi Simon

Thanks for the feedback.

The plan is for V1 to be the features you have right now PLUS the ability to load favourites and playlists by name.

Once those new commands are available, we'll be moving to Beta testing, getting some new testers involved, addressing the DE language version which has fallen behind a little and fixing any bugs that arise.

Once that's all ready, we'll submit for Amazon certification and run that particular gauntlet.

Once published for Amazon Echo, I'll be doing a version for Google Home.

With all that done, I'll then start working on V2 which will include support for synching and groups, loading content by artist/album/track name or genre and possibly other features as they are requested.

One of the key blockages to having artist/album/track requests right now is that Amazon have a beta library that supports this natively but it's only available for US skills right now. I'm waiting for that to be available for UK and DE as well because there's no point in trying to implement our own version which would be far inferior.


In other news, I really haven't been able to dedicate time to this recently. We've stalled a bit because of that but I am inching forward and will be getting those new features out and commencing Beta just as soon as I can.

Peter