Alexa skill routines with sensors

oeo · September 4, 2019, 10:36am

Hi,
just tested the functionality with the Alexa V3 Skill and how Openhab items are recognized in the Alexa app.
I just created a sensor item in OH as a Contact and started the Exploring of new devices with Alexa. Alexa did find the new device and it was recognized as an contact, but I wasnt able to use the device in the Alexa app to trigger a new routine. It just says that I havent devices that could be used for that.
If I create a socket on OH and integrate it in Alexa, I can use it in routines as an action. Maybe thats a bug in the new Alexa V3 skill.
Cheers
Jonad

jeshab · September 12, 2019, 11:34am

This is actually a known issue. It is actually mentioned in the contact and motion sensors documentation. Proactive reporting is required for that support but not yet implemented in the skill. Basically, currently Alexa-linked OH item states are only updated via polling requests opposed to pushing the updated states directly from the OH server. This is part of the asynchronous enhancement which will be a major change.

github.com/openhab/openhab-alexa

Asynchronous Deferred Response Support

opened 09:09PM - 16 May 18 UTC

jsetton

enhancement

@digitaldan - I have been working to add asynchronous response support so we can… send [deferred response](https://developer.amazon.com/docs/device-apis/alexa-interface.html#deferredresponse) for device such as locks to report the accurate state once the action is complete. Part of this integration is the need to send asynchronous responses to the [Alexa Event Gateway](https://developer.amazon.com/docs/smarthome/send-events-to-the-alexa-event-gateway.html) which requires the use of an authentication token not related to the one provided in the directive endpoint scope. That token is actually retrievable through the [Alexa.Authorization](https://developer.amazon.com/docs/device-apis/alexa-authorization.html) directive sent to the skill when the "Send Alexa Events" skill permission is enabled and a user enables the skill on his account. When handling the Authorization directives and getting the [OAuth2 tokens from LWA API](https://developer.amazon.com/docs/smarthome/authenticate-a-customer-permissions.html), we are expected to store these keys for each user, so they can be used later on along with having to refresh them when necessary. So this is the part, I am looking for some feedback. How do we want to store this information? My first intuition was to just use a DymamoDB table to do so. Another option, if we want to just rely on each user openHAB instance, we could store that information in the cloud connector service config through the REST API.