This morning I had major issues with getting the skill to shuffle play my playlist. There were three songs that produced just silence, two of which I noted down and later tried to play using stream.mp3 as described above. Both of them played in the web browser.
I also checked the alexa voice history to see if that would explain some of the other failures. Turns out that in one case, she understood "tell me the server" instead of tell media server. Which is obviously pretty poor AI performance, given that she has a skill called "media server". In fact, I would claim that there is no AI involved here. It's just stupid to immediately fall back on the default answer "Here's something I found on the web..." I don't get why you wouldn't check against similar sounding skill names before coming up with a nonsense guess of what the user might have meant by "tell me the server". In another situation alexa just heard the wake word but not the following wake word. The only difference to the second time I said it was that the pause between "Alexa" and "next" was a tiny fraction of a second shorter. She simply doesn't seem to listen long enough after the key word. Half or even a quarter of a second more would probably solve a lot of issues. I noticed earlier that "Alexa, skip" works most of the time while "Alexa, next" doesn't. My explanation for this is now that the "s" in skip makes enough of a hissing sound to keep Alexa awake while the "n" in next doesn't. That's how tiny the difference is. The only thing I can do as a user here is try and ignore the Alexa ring light and just talk. What I mean is that I noticed a tendency in my family to say "Alexa", then wait for here to indicate that she's listening, and then give the command. As I noticed this kinda natural behaviour in others, I realised that I was also doing it, though to a lesser extent. I don't really like to train myself, though, to not wait for the light to go on. Firstly, because it means that I will have to repeat commands when it turns out that Alexa didn't wake up, but also because Alexa is already teaching us habits that are not good for human interaction (like not saying thank you when someone did something for you or ordering her to stop talking) so that I think it would be good to maintain the attitude of waiting for a response before starting the conversation. Nut apart from those concerns, I won't quite understand why the slight pause between the wake word and the command works without problems outside of the media server skill. It's only when MediaServer is active that this problem occurs. Do you as skill developer have control over the waiting period or is Amazon defining shorter in-skill periods? philchillbill wrote: > Of the 14 Echos I've owned over time, two had microphones go bad so > Alexa misinterpreted a lot of my commands (they were both 2nd generation > Echo Dots). That might be your issue too because I agree there's not > much can go wrong with just saying 2 words. You can try 'Simon Says' > with a longish sentence (she reads back what you say). For example, > "Alexa, Simon Says this is a test of the microphone in my device". If > the audio stutters, you know you have a hardware problem. > I will try simon says asap but I don't think that is the issue. The Echo dot that I've tested this most on is brand new and the same problem has occurred on at least one other echo dot. philchillbill wrote: > I might be able to add a 'shuffled' qualifier to the StreamPlaylist > command. That would have to be an an exact syntax where you'd say > 'stream the playlist -whatever- *shuffled*'. Not a natural flow of words > but it would work. I'll do all that after the current certification > submission passes because I can't touch the live skill at the moment or > risk rejection. Amazon normally certifies in 1-2 days but it's been over > a week already so they are apparently slow due to Covid understaffing. If "shuffled" is added at the end, isn't there a risk that it gets interpreted as part of the playlist name? Then again, always removing the last "shuffled" from the playlist name would probably work. So even if you had a playlist ending with "shuffled" saying playlist something shuffled shuffled would work. So, yea, that would be great have! Alternatively: how about "shuffleplay" and "shufflestream" as commands? i.e. "Alexa, tell mediaserver to shufflestream favourite 8" instead of "Alexa, tell mediaserver to stream favourite 8 shuffled" *Server*: LMS 8.1.1 on an Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machine *Players*: Radio, Touch, Duet (Receiver & Controller), 2 Booms *Remote control apps*: Material Skin (Web UI), but also SqueezePad (iOS), Squeezecontroller (Android) *Important plugins*: Trackstat, Spicefly Sugarcube, Lazy Search Music, Custom Browse, Multi Library ------------------------------------------------------------------------ chaug's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=47641 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=111016 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list plugins@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/plugins
