Amazon Echo/ Alexa

[brantome]

(29-01-2017 10:31)simoncn Wrote:  

(29-01-2017 09:54)brantome Wrote:  As I said on the thread on the Linn forum, maybe voice control is a new paradigm and the structure of the media server is no longer important i.e. you'll directly ask for tracks by a particular artist, for example, rather than navigating a media server's 'virtual' folder hierarchy.

This makes sense to me. However, it would still be possible for this new type of front end to interface to a media server using UPnP or something similar.

I take your point, but given that 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, otherwise there'd be a danger of anyone outside your home network accessing your UPnP service. House Band uses the JMC media server token to ensure that the traffic securely gets to the right server/ service, using I guess JMC web services via their WebGizmo route rather than UPnP requests. Therefore I suspect a generic UPnP Alexa cloud skill might be impractical.