When using multiple Amazon Echo Dot devices, is it possible to identify which one triggered a skill?

1
votes

I'm using Amazon's Echo Dot, and I have several Echo devices. Let's assume this is the setup:

  • Room 1 (with Echo Dot 1) -> Light 1
  • Room 2 (with Echo Dot 2) -> Light 2

I've setup a Smart Home Skill to turn on lights, and I can turn on/off the lights by saying things like these:

  • "Alexa, turn on light 1"
  • "Alexa, turn on light 2"

So far, so good. Now, I would like to not tell Alexa "light 1" or "light 2", but detect which Echo device (Echo Dot 1 or Echo Dot 2) detected the utterance and triggerd the skill, so I would be able to say something like:

  • "Alexa, turn on the light"

.. then decide if we are on Room 1 or Room 2 by seeing which Echo Dot activated, and turn on/off the matching light.

Since Devices have to be discovered upfront, and if no device found by the specified name the skill won't be triggered, I assume this would involve to return sort of a "virtual" device in the Discover endpoint, to model both Light 1 and Light 2, and decide which one is it by using the ID of the Echo Dot that triggered the event.

However, when debugging the invoked AWS Lambda function, I cannot find any indication about which particular Echo device was activated.

Is this possible? If not, do you know of any other way to achieve the same UX?

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aws-lambdaalexa-skills-kitalexa-skill

2 Answers

2
votes

No, sadly this is not possible. A lot of us would like this though...

Reference

In this answer from Amazon (pasted here for access, slightly reformatted):

Having multiple echos on an account, is there a way in a custom skill to determine the echo that a request has come from?

Answer by [Amazonian] Levon@Amazon ยท Jul 11 at 11:32 AM

...

Regrettably, that use case is not supported at the moment.

1
votes

Possible hacky solution... have each dot with its own amazon account and associate each one with their own variation of your lambda function. So Dot A uses lambda A for room A and dot B uses lambda B for room B. One problem I see is they wont play well together as they are on different accounts and you wont get your prime subscription for amazon music etc. But they don't sync very well anyway as I've heard so might not be much of an issue. It's something I might end up doing for my secondary dots if I buy more for other rooms that my main livingroom.