Amazon Echo/ Alexa

[brantome]

(29-01-2017 14:14)DavidHB Wrote:  

(29-01-2017 12:29)brantome Wrote:  ... Amazon Alexa skills are cloud based, and UPnP I understand is primarily an open unauthenticated protocol, port forwarding from the cloud to your local network and some form of authentication is needed ... Therefore I suspect a generic UPnP Alexa cloud skill might be impractical.

UPnP can be used now to access streaming services requiring authentication; most streamers have this capability, and many control points support it. UPnP also provides the messaging protocol for DLNA. This suggests that there is no fundamental obstacle in the protocols to having voice based commands replace or supplement a touch screen when using a UPnP control point. My guess is that such functionality, if it appears, will do so first using the voice activation features of particular platforms (Siri, Cortana etc.) before migrating to proprietary devices. I'd think that the biggest obstacle to using Alexa as an interface is that Amazon have always been reluctant to allow any from of access from their information base to non-Amazon information or sales sites; the Amazon site is a hyperlink black hole.

The other point is that it is in our interests as users to support open rather than closed systems when making choices about which platforms to buy and use. Closed systems can disappear and leave users high and dry (look what happened to Squeezebox), and some of our favourite applications (including MinimServer) only exist because they can use open systems infrastructure.

David

David, thanks for the update, I wasn't aware of that (obviously) and take your point re open systems.

However, I don't understand the point re Amazon being the biggest obstacle - surely the existence of the House Band skill, albeit being restricted to JMC, shows that Amazon is open to hosting skills such as that, further evidenced by the existence of 'third party' custom skills for smart home suppliers, which already rely on communicating using open web protocols to locally installed devices?

From your opening paragraph, I now don't see why someone couldn't develop an Alexa secure generic UPNP skill.

Cheers