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Create my own verbal shortcuts?

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plumptaco

Create my own verbal shortcuts?
« on: October 20, 2019, 08:55:22 am »
Is there a way I can create my own verbal shortcuts that issue full commands to different Alexa skills?

I have added a bunch of skills that do very helpful things (e.g., home automation and whole house music), but am finding the specificity of the commands is too much to remember, and thus easy to bumble. Example: "Alexa, ask Connect Control to play Spotify on device 2". What a mouthful.

Is there a skill or IFTTT applet I can add to Alexa to help me simplify verbal commands? I would love to create a mapping of various shortcut phrases that all result in one official long command, like this:

"Alexa, play music everywhere"  --> passes the full command "Alexa, ask Connect Control to play Spotify on device 2"

Thanks for any guidance!




Re: Create my own verbal shortcuts?
« Reply #1 on: October 20, 2019, 01:00:29 pm »
I think you can create a routine with your shortened phrase.  Like you, I didn’t want to ramble a lengthy phrase or tolerate the slight IFFTT delay to open or close my garage door so I created a routine in my Alexa App.  Now I just say, “Alexa, open the garage door” instead of “Tell (app name) to open the garage door”.....

plumptaco

Re: Create my own verbal shortcuts?
« Reply #2 on: October 20, 2019, 01:46:25 pm »
Thanks @VKSheridan.

Indeed, I tried routines. Unfortunately, routines limit you to executing the predefined "actions" listed in the Alexa app. I'm looking for an approach that gives me the flexibility to map custom phrasing to any command that a given skill can normally act on.

From what I can tell, routines seem similar to IFTTT, actually, in that you're limited to whatever predefined actions are actually offered for each skill. And a good many skills aren't even supported/offered at all.