Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python

developer.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 43 posts

Re: An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python

#31

Post by hultner »

th0ma5 wrote: post #30
Herald_MJ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should help you: https://gist.github.com/reggi/dc5f2620b7b4f515e68e46255ac042... Once you have your lambda running inside a VPC, you can assign an elastic IP to the VPC. You don't need an EC2 instance, but you will need a NAT gateway, which is billed at similar levels to a small EC2 instance anyway.

Hrmmm perhaps I'll just have to develop something with single packet encrypted port knocking perhaps. ~$36 a month is out of mine price range for something that is like 100k bytes a month (say having an Echo skill that can control Home Assistant)...

Can’t you open up a SSH-tunnel from the lambda? I think there are Python clients if OpenSSH isn’t available in lambda instances (anyone know which binaries are available? I suppose it’s a quite barebone Linux container)

Re: An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python

#32

Post by nl »

th0ma5 wrote: post #26
ryall wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if I understand what you're after, but AWS offers private API Gateway's now

Echo Lambda ?? Home Network For ?? I've tried just making the lambda directly connect to an open port, but this requires me to open the router to quite a large range since lambdas don't have static IPs. I'd like a VPN in ?? I have that for my phone. As I dig into VPC and such it seems like it almost requires an EC2 endpoint for me to VPN into from my network which will NAT the request? I'd like to not have to pay for…

Not sure about lamba, but the Firebase equivalent can make outgoing requests. You can setup challenge/response auth and then have a gateway controller in your network using that.

Re: An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python

#33

Post by th0ma5 »

hultner wrote: post #31
th0ma5 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hrmmm perhaps I'll just have to develop something with single packet encrypted port knocking perhaps. ~$36 a month is out of mine price range for something that is like 100k bytes a month (say having an Echo skill that can control Home Assistant)...

Can’t you open up a SSH-tunnel from the lambda? I think there are Python clients if OpenSSH isn’t available in lambda instances (anyone know which binaries are available? I suppose it’s a quite barebone Linux container)

I guess I don't want a socket listening. If AWS would publish their subnets maybe I could limit it to those addresses. It sure seems like they could keep their subnets dynamic and accommodate something like this but I guess not.

Re: An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python

#34

Post by daveguy »

jon-wood wrote: post #18
gnufied wrote: post #2

I own several Echo devices and programmability of Alexa devices just baffles me. There is still no way for a skill to read notifications. For example - I want to write a calendar notification app which unifies all calendar events across several sources and there is just no way to do it. It is of course disabled in the name of privacy which I can understand - but I don't understand how I can't enable this for a device…

The Echo Show is a horrible disappointment. I got one when they were released in the UK because it seemed the perfect thing to keep in the kitchen, but it’s crippled beyond usefulness. My primary use case was going to be watching Netflix with voice control. Netflix has yet to appear on the Show, and because of Amazon’s zealot like insistence that everything be driven by a voice UI there’s no web browser or app suppor…

That is strange. Especially considering the original echo has a volume ring on the top for manual volume adjustment. I'm surprised the echo show is voice only and doesn't include a touchscreen. Thank you for the heads up.

Re: An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python

#35

Post by charred_toast »

chishaku wrote: post #6

Flask-ask makes it pretty easy. https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-ask

I agree, I've used this package since the beginning. Python is my favorite computer language so far. I started with Flash, then HTML & CSS, then jQuery, PHP, MySQL, etc. Could not mention Python without Virtualenv, Django, and Flask. To me, these tools are like LEGO for programming. I like JS too, who wouldn't? People literally live on the internet.

Re: An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python

#36

Post by andrewthebold »

dr01d wrote: post #21
oulipo wrote: post #15

If you care about your privacy, you can also build your own 100% on-device Voice AI for free using https://snips.ai (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder) We are building an open-source and 100% private-by-design Voice AI platform, and you can code your first private assistant in less than 1h: https://medium.com/snips-ai/building-a-voice-controlled-home...

gah, what the heck is wrong with that woman's head on the homepage. Nightmare fuel.

Looks like the video got vertically squished?

Re: An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python

#37

Post by athrun »

th0ma5 wrote: post #33
hultner wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t you open up a SSH-tunnel from the lambda? I think there are Python clients if OpenSSH isn’t available in lambda instances (anyone know which binaries are available? I suppose it’s a quite barebone Linux container)

I guess I don't want a socket listening. If AWS would publish their subnets maybe I could limit it to those addresses. It sure seems like they could keep their subnets dynamic and accommodate something like this but I guess not.

They do [1]. In JSON.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-ip-ranges....

Re: An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python

#38

Post by StavrosK »

kingbirdy wrote: post #17
oulipo wrote: post #15

If you care about your privacy, you can also build your own 100% on-device Voice AI for free using https://snips.ai (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder) We are building an open-source and 100% private-by-design Voice AI platform, and you can code your first private assistant in less than 1h: https://medium.com/snips-ai/building-a-voice-controlled-home...

The platform looks interesting, but the fact that you're offering an ICO makes me immediately wary of your company.

I tried Snips for a bit the other day on my Raspi 3, and it worked as advertised, detection was great, making skills was simple, and it's much better than Alexa in that you don't have to say "tell to ", the entire namespace is immediately available. It's all that I've wanted from such a device.

I do agree, however, that the ICO makes the whole thing feel scammy. It's a terrible idea, I guess they got lured in by the promise of free money and shoehorned a token into their app.

Re: An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python

#39

Post by StavrosK »

gnufied wrote: post #2

I own several Echo devices and programmability of Alexa devices just baffles me. There is still no way for a skill to read notifications. For example - I want to write a calendar notification app which unifies all calendar events across several sources and there is just no way to do it. It is of course disabled in the name of privacy which I can understand - but I don't understand how I can't enable this for a device…

It really is too crippled. I wanted to have my various home devices send me notifications (e.g. "3D print finished successfully"), but Alexa just cannot do it. I didn't even want it to spontaneously start saying things, flashing the light until I said "what's up, Alexa?" or something would be great, but nope, nothing.

I really hope Snips catches on, as it's much, much more hackable.

Re: An Easier Way to Build Alexa Skills Using Python

#40

Post by StavrosK »

oulipo wrote: post #15

If you care about your privacy, you can also build your own 100% on-device Voice AI for free using https://snips.ai (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder) We are building an open-source and 100% private-by-design Voice AI platform, and you can code your first private assistant in less than 1h: https://medium.com/snips-ai/building-a-voice-controlled-home...

As I said downstream, I tried Snips and it's great, so I hope it catches on. Everything works as advertised, it sends all recognized commands to MQTT so integration with anything else is pretty much instant, and detection works well.

I thought of buying the hardware to make the Snips device (to support the company financially as well), but I realized that I use my Echo mostly for Spotify (as it's a bit too crippled to use for much else), which Snips wouldn't be able to support.

I still might get/build one for all the home automation I can't use the Echo for, but a big use case is immediately removed if it can't play Spotify.

Post reply on HN