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Alexa Skill

PostPosted: Thu Sep 21, 2017 11:45 am
by CeePeeBee
Hi guys

I'm not a Dev but as subsonic servers are often on the same LAN as the Amazon Echo /Dot devices would be can we not get a skill to integrate and okay from it? I really want to play my Subsonic playlist rather than relying on Amazon music which I don't use!

Anyone else in the same boat?

Re: Alexa Skill

PostPosted: Thu Sep 21, 2017 11:23 pm
by acroyear
It has been discussed in feature requests. It is not trivial to do. The issue is the authentication mechanism. Alexa wants to connect to other services via OAuth, which subsonic does not support. To implement, somebody would need to create a wrapper service that would provide the proper authenticated URLs given the proper OAuth credentials. That would require the independent service to cache usernames and passwords, so you'll have to trust whomever is hosting it that they're keeping things secure.

There may also be an HTTPS requirement in the service, and for things like Alexa (and the Fire TV for SubFire), it won't accept self-signed certs. That's a "may". I don't know for sure, because the OAuth blocker is a bigger issue.

So it is not technically impossible, but it is not trivial and it would require a bit of trust on the part of the users of the authentication wrapper.

Re: Alexa Skill

PostPosted: Sat Sep 23, 2017 8:09 pm
by CeePeeBee
Thanks for the reply - I didn't fully understand the complexity but I did I made the general connection that it was possible.

Looks unlikely this will happen then sadly. Wondering whether there is anything else out there I can overlay over my library to allow Alexa to see it... Different forum required though ;)

Re: Alexa Skill

PostPosted: Sun Sep 24, 2017 3:25 pm
by acroyear
https://www.plex.tv/apps/streaming-devi ... zon-alexa/ might suit that need for now. I keep my music collection visible in both services, just in case one of the two servers goes down while I'm away.

Re: Alexa Skill

PostPosted: Tue Sep 26, 2017 2:47 pm
by CeePeeBee
acroyear wrote:https://www.plex.tv/apps/streaming-devices/amazon-alexa/ might suit that need for now. I keep my music collection visible in both services, just in case one of the two servers goes down while I'm away.


Thanks for that, unfortunately I don't think it would help. I use a number of devices to playback my media (audio and video etc), however what I was hoping to achieve is the Amazon Music Alexa skill but for a local music library (local to the LAN), through the Echo.

If I'm reading this correctly, all it will allow me to do is act as a voice remote for the playback of my Plex library on another device, not the Echo.

Correct?

Re: Alexa Skill

PostPosted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 9:24 pm
by acroyear
I can't say. I almost never use voice recognition for anything. My fingers are faster 90% of the time and I don't have an Echo or anything other than Fire tablets and TV/Sticks.

Re: Alexa Skill

PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2017 4:00 am
by oshman6785
CeePeeBee wrote:If I'm reading this correctly, all it will allow me to do is act as a voice remote for the playback of my Plex library on another device, not the Echo.

Correct?


My Echo connected to my Plex media server does play music through the Echo device.

Re: Alexa Skill

PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2017 4:22 pm
by acroyear
Plex just added oauth authentication, which is why they now have the "signin through google" and "signin through facebook" features on some platforms (and also why the login sessions expire in a few days ;-) ). Pretty useful, but subsonic still needs such an adapter for alexa support.