Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd. - Support Forums and Community

im fairly sure it will ignore the 'to' and do what you ask anyways.

i try all manner of things, using regular natural speech and it is really accurate. although sometimes it has no idea what to do and i need to repeat it in the right format.

some examples, prefaced with "Alexa, tell Control to":

turn on the living room lights
turn on the living room
turn the living room lights on
turn the living room on
turn on living room
turn living room on
dim the living room lights 50% (dims them to 50%)
dim the living room to 50%

so somehow it knows what it's listening for and parses the speech accordingly. my wife is a computational linguist and tries to explain how it knows what to do, but i dont listen.

Thanks for the tips! Sounds like I just need to setup some examples and see what works :-)

Don't do it yet. I'll put up a 4.7.7 here in a bit. It has three new intents:

"Run With", basically run plus parameters to pass to run
"Set Off/Set On", which are specialized set commands

So you can do:

Alexa, tell control to turn off the front porch lights
Alexa, tell control to turn the volume off

And the 'on' versions of those as well. These off/on commands just map to the Set part of the configuration file, it's just that the value is always going to be off or on.

On, and new utterances for the query intent, so you can do either:

Alexa, ask control is the kitchen light on

or

Alexa, ask control if the kitchen light is on

That means you have to have both "kitchen light on" and "kitchen light is on" in the configuration file, to handle both variations.

The above got me to thinking, maybe how it should be is like this:


So the first entry of each phrase is the main one, then any possible alternatives. But, no matter which one is hit, it's the main phrase that gets passed to your handler. That would alleviate the need for your handler to deal with all of the possible variables.

OK, I've updated the first page with new info. You'll have to install the new 4.7.7 linked there, and use the new javascript, intent schema, and sample utterances, since they are of a piece. So make sure you update everything.

One thing I noticed, that may need to be looked at down the road is the ID Key. I had set mine on CQC and Lambda to a certain key, then changed it on both after it was set up. It apparently started sending the new key from Amazon to CQC, but on the CQC side it rejected it even after multiple reloads of the config file. In order to get it working, I had to change back to the old ID. Not sure why the configuration file wouldn't accept a new ID, because other changes in the config file did work.

It definitely should load the new key. Was the echo talking back to you and saying the key was wrong?

I've posted 4.7.8. It includes some improvements in the Echo support. These are listed below.

The only changes on your configuration side is in the utterances, so you'll need to update that list if on a previous version, from the list on the first page of this thread, in order to be compatible with this version.

The improvements are:

Better Alternative Phrase Support

The configuration file now supports this type of thing:


So, where before you just put all of the possible phrases that you wanted a particular handler to deal with, and had to watch for all of them in your handler (if supporting more than one phrase), now you can bunch related ones on a single line, comma separated. No matter which of them on a particular line matches, the first value on the line is what is sent to your handler. So, it reduces a lot the number of possible variations you have to watch for.

So, in the example above, if I said:


You handler would still get the phrase "WASHER RUNNING" as the invoked phrase, since it's the first one on that line.

Of course, you can still have just one value on a line, so it's backwards compatible with existing files.

Another Run Keyword

I added Load to the list of possible keywords to kick off a Run type intent. The reason being that often the special "Load Echo Configuration" command seemed to be coming up ambiguous. By adding Load as a keyword, the Load word becomes part of the fixed utterance and only the Echo Configuration part is the variable bit. That seems to make it more reliable, but you can also use it yourself where Load makes more sense than Run, or is easier to say or be recognized by the Echo.

And you can also now, for the special command just say:


which is shorter and easier to say.

Yes, Alexa said that CQC rejected the key. No big deal, but it didn't seem to get reset with the load configuration command. Maybe your new configuration method will get it to work correctly.

Probably not. I'll try it myself tomorrow and see what happens. Are you completely sure you got it saved and updated on the Amazon server side?