Alexa appliance discovery in custom skill

Question

I have been checking around on this topic, but have not seen a concrete solution on how to get it working. I am building a Custom Skill for Alexa, which currently supports speech. Now I would like to extend the skill with video streaming to a TV. The only thing the Custom Skill seems to support for this is streaming to Echo Show with the VideoApp directives?

I have seen answers that say it is possible, just return a list of devices, but these devices and their appliance id's seem to be hardcoded, I would need to get an actual list of devices linked to the users account.

So the question is: is it actually possible to incorporate Video Skill functionality (and device discovery) in a custom skill, or would it need to be a separate skill?

Answer 1

Since the SmartTV is not an Alexa-enabled device, streaming to it will be a separate API from the Alexa APIs.

An Alexa skill is similar to a web API, where the front end, user interface, is Alexa.

Imagine if you were building a website that had a couple of buttons on it and a text box. Users would enter some info in the text box and press one of the buttons to start streaming on the TV. The code behind the website would have to communicate with the smart TV somehow to stream the content.

The same way, your skill code would have to figure out a way to communicate with the Smart TV.

This is not something that Alexa would support directly, so it become necessary to identify the API for your SmartTV and a way to communicate to it from the internet which won’t be trivial.