Hey Phil,
Wanted to give some feedback. We recently tested our MediaServer (and LMS Lite) to see how it might fit into our whole house audio system w/2 SB Touch devices. First and foremost, I want to say how much I appreciated your nicely designed software and web content, and your overall superb support for everyone here. This is the first mondo-thread where I read every post from 1 to n. Great work, and thank you. Ultimately, however, we found that voice control of our systems in this fashion would not work for us. Much of this has to do with things that are beyond your control. But here are the issues we encountered, just as FYIs: - For installation, the only issue I had was failure of the page redirects to enable the authorization of the skill. I figured it out, but it just didn't work via the Alexa app. The Alexa app (on iOS) would pop open the internal browser, but credentials never moved past the Authorizing screen - it just spun forever. So I managed this elsewhere. - The docs are still a bit confusing as to which credentials are supposed to be entered. This should be made crystal clear and unambiguous. - The entire reason for us to use MediaServer + LMS Lite was so that my wife could quickly start playback, and control, her choice of radio streams (she doesn't do much playback of our audio rips, since she can't recall at a moment what we have, nor does she think about or engage with music in this way). But to do this as a one-shot required me to configure Routines for each favorite station. Obviously this method severely limits playback choices. - Alexa had a very difficult time hearing words while audio volume was sufficiently high. In fact, it's easy to say, she just couldn't hear, or discern our commands while some talk show was playing. The whole house speakers in, say the kitchen, have enough energy that Alexa was essentially unable to hear, sans shouting. - The required command language for various controls felt too unnatural for my wife, robotic, and required a lot of memorization of what would work, what would not, and under which circumstances to use certain directives, verbs, nouns, and prepositions. I would have had to post a cheat sheet for her. And that would work for one room only, requiring that she uses different commands in other rooms. Ultimately, she'd like to say "Play BBC World News" to get playback in any room she was in, just like she can with the Echo's. So, it was a dead end, requiring too much customization, per room, and franking too much talking. So convenience and ease of use prevailed over better audio. And finally on this point, she has a better tool at her disposal to play anything - she calls on me to make it happen. - MediaServer has many commands, and capabilities, most of which we would never use. We'd never stream via LMS to our Echo devices, or other targets. Every room has it's own set of speakers, controlled by the whole house audio system. So it would have been nice to disable all commands for things we would never use, and avoid the mistaken playback on Echo devices. We found too many times that Alexa would play to, or control, the local Echo and not do what we wanted. I would be great if there was a configuration that could disable certain commands, so that any requests for Help could return only the enabled / available commands. This would have greatly help present a simple view which might have worked better for my wife. I'm pretty sure this is outside of your control with a skill. - We found MediaServer / Alexa would not remember the assumed player. Trying to figure out when it would, would not, was an exercise in futility for us. It would have been nice to be able to configure the system to know about one and only one device, a single Touch (we have 2 in our whole house audio rack, and I select which I want to use at any given time). In this model, there could never be mistakes as to which player was getting the command (albeit, Alexa does tend to want do insert herself into the audio playback). And if MediaServer could then assume that player entirely, that would have helped. - MediaServer - The skill name itself kept feeling like too many syllables (its also a "word" that requires much mouth/tongue gymnastics, and with quick or slurred speech, was often mistaken). At 5 syllables just for the skill name, and then all those for the commands, it felt like there was so much talky-talky, back and forth, the entire voice model was far more cumbersome and error-prone than just walking over to the kitchen's iPad and using Material Skin for command / playback selection (and there are no mistakes, repeated commands doing this), or just using the kitchen's Echo directly. - LMS Lite - This was used only to turn on / of the whole house audio amp, and for Stop, Pause. And this requires that our Elan system was programmed to support certain Alexa skills. It also required me to create the Routines I mentioned above to select, for a given zone, which Touch would be used. Since we leave the Touch devices set to 100% volume, there was no use for any volume-related commands. We never use shuffle, repeat, loop, so it would, again, be nice to be able to disable certain command sets / features to minimize any help returned when requested. I have no idea if this is even possible with the Alexa paradigm. And for volume control, I'd have to create individual routines (per-zone, per playback device), so it would be easy for my wife to increase/decrease/mute the volume. And again, since she had to select one language set to control the Echo directly, and another to control the whole house system, it was game over. Given that our house audio is controlled by a set of amps and processors, I failed to find any working or convenient paradigm for the voice model. I created some Routines to do simple things, like turn on/off a particular audio stream, or switch to a different (pre-programmed) one, but it resulted in what would be far more work than was useful for us. I was hopeful that MediaServer/LMS-Lite would work for us, but was not surprised in the end that it could not, given the basic limitations and restrictions of Alexa, and our existing whole-house audio system's working model. But it was a fun experience, and again, I'm tremendously impressed at what you've created. Congratulations, and great work. Cheers, MrC ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MrC's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=468 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
