Music Control with new voice capabilities

[Roomskills-Com]

We just released a new version of our skill based on the feedback of our users. I gladly share some information here about the skill and please contact us if you have questions or anything does not work for you.

Our skill now provides 2 ways of interaction

1. All players are provided as devices in Alexa and basic commands can be addressed to the devices using the names. Here some examples for a player named "kitchen radio". The names can be set to any name on the Roomskills Website. Sometimes it is good to try different names and see what Alexa understands best.

- Alexa turn kitchen radio on
- Alexa increase volume on kitchen radio
- Alexa, set volume of kitchen radio to 20
- Alexa, go to channel one on kitchen radio.
- Alexa next on kitchen radio
- Alexa previous on kitchen radio

The channel numbers are then referring to the numbers of the favorites as they are defined on the Lyrion Server. They can also be rearranged there.

2. More complex commands require the skill to be called via the invocation name "music control". This can be used to play favorites by the favorite name (e.g. BBC One), play albums or titles using a voice command or group players or transfer the music from another player to the local one, like

- Alexa, tell music control play B B C One
- Alexa, tell music control play the album Abbey Road
- Alexa, tell music control play music from living room radio
- Alexa, tell music control transfer music from living room radio

In order for all these commands to work a little bit of setup actions are required. Since the music servers like Lyrion are local solutions and Alexa needs to happen in the cloud a connection is required that connects the local music server to the cloud and this connection is realized by the small programm Roomskills Local Connect. This has to run in you local network. We provide it as a plugin for the Lyrion server, but since there are so many installation options for the music server this might not always work. Therefore we also provide many other options to run Roomskills Local Connect so we are sure one of them should work.

Once the connection has been established you setup the players on our Roomskills Website and give them a name and assign them to rooms. After that you activate our skill and connect it to your account. The players should automatically appear in the Alexa App.

Now most of the direct commands should work, like turning the players on and off or increase the volume. But for the channel command to work you have to connect the player in the Alexa App to the Alexa device that listens to your commands.

As a last step you have to assign the Alexa device that listens to your commands to a room in order to avoid having to always add the room or player name to a voice command when calling the skill by the invocation name. For this you can just give a command without addressing a specific room. Then the skill automatically asks you to give the standard room and from then onwards it always assumes you address the room or the player in this room when giving a command.

I hope this clarifies some of the questions above. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have questions or want another test period to try our service again.

Ingo from Roomskills