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

[philchillbill]

Okay, I just had a longish chat with the amazon.com support and learned that the country that Alexa checks (and that she refers to when she says that something is not available in your country) is the country set under Content and Devices. As soon as I changed it to a US address, it worked.

According to the very helpful agent, in some skills the important thing is that that address matches the marketplace that you are on (in my case: amazon.com). Before, that address was set to Germany and it didn't matter (I was able to get and use all the english apps I wanted. It was only the subscription that required the US address.

Now the next step will be to figure out how to get Alexa to play music from my LMS. Too tired now to dig into that.

When you say 'a US address', did you need a physical street address in the US to do that or do you mean just selecting the .com domain?

When I go to 'Manage your Content and Devices' I see this:



When I click under those devices, there's no option to select store/region, just to change the device name.

If you could share a screenshot and/or URL of where in the Amazon portal you succeeded (blur any sensitive data) it would be very helpful and I can add a description to the docs to help others. I know people have done this from Italy and Germany in the past before skills were supported natively in Italian and German and things changed since. TBH I never went through the process myself because it always worked for me as dev.

[chaug]

When you say 'a US address', did you need a physical street address in the US to do that or do you mean just selecting the .com domain?

Yes, a physical address. The support agent said I could just enter a random address, but I used one where I did indeed live for some time. The confusing thing is that it's not just about which amazon domain (they call it "marketplace") you use, but that the address has to match the marketplace. Based on that, I would assume (just a hypothetical example), that if you're on amazon.com with a british address, it won't work, even though the app is available in both countries.

I sent you the chat via PM FYI.

When I click under those devices, there's no option to select store/region, just to change the device name.

It should be under preferences (shown on your screenshot)

If you could share a screenshot and/or URL of where in the Amazon portal you succeeded (blur any sensitive data) it would be very helpful and I can add a description to the docs to help others. I know people have done this from Italy and Germany in the past before skills were supported natively in Italian and German and things changed since. TBH I never went through the process myself because it always worked for me as dev.

So the MediaServer skill is available in German? (It doesn't say so on your website). If that is the case, that explains why the agent says it is available on the German store.

Anyway, here is the setting that Alexa checks when you try to subscribe:



(OMG, iserting pictures is such a pain on this forum... I wish they'd change to discourse.)

[philchillbill]

So the MediaServer skill is available in German? (It doesn't say so on your website). If that is the case, that explains why the agent says it is available on the German store.

Many thanks — I got the details in your PM and will play with it to generalise for others.

In the skill manifest, I use "isAvailableWorldwide": true and "distributionCountries": []. That should mean I'm not restricting anything and it's all down to Amazon. They state the following:



Notice "A skill must have a German version to be available to customers who registered their devices with the .de site". There is no German language version of MediaServer. But what you have discovered should mean that a physical location in Germany will still allow accessing the skill (and subscribing) provided that the device is registered with the .com marketplace and a (notional) US street address. That's probably what Lawrence at Amazon was eluding to.

[philchillbill]

The second post in this thread has been updated with a list of how to speak several commands in French and German. If anybody can suggest working phraseology for e.g. playing favorites and changing shuffle/repeat modes, I'll add them. Amazon has no docs on their own voice model I'm afraid

[philchillbill]

About 99% of the logs for LMS-lite are failed connection attempts to ngrok endpoints that have (long since) expired. Amazon keeps sending Discovery requests every 6 hours or so for any linked smart-home skills, even if the user long forgot they enabled the skill, tried it twice, and abandoned it.

To automatically purge all this crap data, from now on all requests toward ngrok that result in a 404 will propagate an error code back to Amazon that will cause Amazon to immediately unlink the skill. Note that this is only for LMS-lite and not MediaServer. Basically, if you keep your LMS accessible from the cloud, LMS-lite will work as it should. If you're sloppy, that behaviour will now be penalised.

[staresy]

About 99% of the logs for LMS-lite are failed connection attempts to ngrok endpoints that have (long since) expired. Amazon keeps sending Discovery requests every 6 hours or so for any linked smart-home skills, even if the user long forgot they enabled the skill, tried it twice, and abandoned it.

To automatically purge all this crap data, from now on all requests toward ngrok that result in a 404 will propagate an error code back to Amazon that will cause Amazon to immediately unlink the skill. Note that this is only for LMS-lite and not MediaServer. Basically, if you keep your LMS accessible from the cloud, LMS-lite will work as it should. If you're sloppy, that behaviour will now be penalised.

I may have suffered from this. In the recent hot weather I had a power outage for an hour or so. Upon power restoration the Mediaserver skill worked fine but LMS-Lite had un-linked itself.

[philchillbill]

I may have suffered from this. In the recent hot weather I had a power outage for an hour or so. Upon power restoration the Mediaserver skill worked fine but LMS-Lite had un-linked itself.

Probably just bad luck. If Amazon hadn't coincidentally sent a Discovery request during your power outage it would have stayed linked. They seem to do that every 6-12 hours.

[philchillbill]

I've added the Alexa.PlaybackStateReporter interface to LMS-lite. What it's really for is not documented by Amazon. It might be for a (future) display within the Alexa app, or it may show a graphic on an Echo Show when you issue e.g. Play/Pause/Stop. Hell, it might even allow you to ask "Alexa, is the bedroom player playing?".

If anybody notices then please let me know.

[philchillbill]

All the 'interfaces' used by LMS-lite have been available in both Spanish and Italian for a while now. That means that LMS-lite could be made available in those spoken languages if the store description that appears at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B083H9JTJY/ was translated. Smart-home skills have no voice model so there's nothing under the skill's hood to translate. It's only 180 words

Any volunteers?

[philchillbill]

I've migrated the ngrok-handling backend of LMS-lite from a SQL/MariaDB database in the Netherlands to AWS noSQL DynamoDB databases in Amazon's eu-west-1 (Ireland) and us-east-1 (N. Virginia) regions. These databases are SSD-hosted and sit in the same datacenters as the skill's Lambda functions. This typically lowers latency by 1500-2000ms per invocation, unless the Lambda container went 'cold' because nobody anywhere used the skill in the last 10 minutes before you. If it's 'warm', you should definitely notice snappier responses.

Note this only affects ngrok users and not anybody with a DNS/roll-your-own proxy (these are always snappy because there's no ngrok lookup for your uuid). I've no idea why, but way more LMS-lite users roll their own proxies compared to MediaServer users — maybe it's because they are mostly smart-home tinkerers. Note that MediaServer already uses DynamoDB for ngrok-caching (because it's much easier to do in a custom skill than a smart-home skill) so no changes there.

Enjoy !