[mh] Venturing into Alexa

Well, I now have an Alexa Dot, and and Alexa plug, and am interesting in 
venturing into MH integration. Particularly the ability to send MH voice 
commands, via Alexa, to MH, which to me is the holy grail of being able 
to talk to my MH system. I've had that working in the (distant) past 
with a Bluetooth headset, but that was just awkward.

I'm looking for "starting from nothing". I suffer from being far behind 
the rest of y'all in skillset. Here's my results from digging through 
the last few years of messages on SourceForge.  It looks to me like 
there's currently two paths to Alexa implementation, and both methods 
let Alexa tell MH what to do as voice commands.

Wayne's mimicking the PhillipsHue with mh/lib/AlexaBridge.pm  & 
my_alexa.pl (also referred to as the "built-in" integration referenced 
by giles?). This involves installing a "3rd party" Alexa HA bridge on a 
server somewhere? It has the problem with occasionally losing all the 
devices.  It's at least generated the most list traffic, so likely the 
most used.
items.mht:
ALEXA_BRIDGE, Alexa
ALEXABRIDGE_ITEM, AlexaItems, Alexa
ALEXABRIDGE_ADD, AlexaItems, Kitchen_lamp, Kitchen lamp
ALEXABRIDGE_ADD, AlexaItems, Lounge_lamp,                 Lounge lamp


mh.private.ini:
password_allow_clients = 127\.0\.0\.1,192\.168\.2\..+,239.255.255.250
alexa_enable=1
alexaEnableChunked=1
alexaObjectsPerGet = 300
http_port=80
alexaHttpPort = 80
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/waynieack/misterhouse/AlexaBridge/lib/AlexaBridge.pm

With docs at:
https://github.com/hollie/misterhouse/wiki/Amazon-Echo-and-Google-Home-Local-Integration-using-MH-native-Hue-Emulation#installation-and-enabling-hints
and
 
https://github.com/hollie/misterhouse/wiki/Echo-integration-using-amazon-echo-ha-bridge

(I'm not sure why these are separate docs? Searching for Alexa in the 
wiki turns up only one page: 
https://github.com/hollie/misterhouse/wiki/Items-AlexaBridge). The docs 
should consistently be "Echo" or "Alexa" and likely "Alexa" given the 
name of the module? ? Why don't all three come up when I search for 
"Alexa" or "Echo" ? ? ?


***Giles Instructions which appear really different than the Wiki: 
https://sourceforge.net/p/misterhouse/mailman/message/36880826/



And the other implementation is Brian's AWS implementation with the 
Alexa Smart Home API with alexa.pl (should this be alexaAPI.pl perhaps?) 
using a reverse proxy and Amazon AWS, which sounds like it has a far 
more complex implementation, if better documented:
https://sourceforge.net/p/misterhouse/mailman/message/35585140/
https://sourceforge.net/p/misterhouse/mailman/message/35583282/
https://sourceforge.net/p/misterhouse/mailman/message/35577551/
https://github.com/rudybrian/misterhouse/tree/add_alexa_smart_home_support
https://github.com/rudybrian/IoT-Playground/blob/master/AWS-Lambda/MisterHouse-alexa-smart-home-skill-api-forwarder.js

Is it time to add this implementation to the Wiki?


Anyway, so it looks like implementing Wayne's solution will be "easiest" 
(for varying definitions of that word).
https://github.com/hollie/misterhouse/wiki/Items-AlexaBridge
doesn't include any proxy instructions. Is a proxy no longer needed?


Rick
PS A more irreverent question. If you can see the history of alexa 
commands on the voice history at alexa.amazon.com, why not just have MH 
scrape it out for MH usage?


-- 
Rick Steeves
http://www.irelandbybicycle.com

And then I have to think more carefully, "What would Bugs Bunny do in a 
situation like this?"


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