MrC wrote: > > 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.
Good to hear :cool: MrC wrote: > > - 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. Good point. The docs used to say not to try it from the app but that got removed in a pare-down. I'll put it back in. MrC wrote: > > - The docs are still a bit confusing as to which credentials are > supposed to be entered. This should be made crystal clear and > unambiguous. In reality, what other credentials might even be relevant? See https://mediaserver.smartskills.tech/ac-link-lms.html. It already says " Type the username and password you previously chose in the configurator". How could that be clearer? MrC wrote: > > - 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. With LMS-lite, a mere "Alexa, favorite three on Kitchen" will play favorite number 3 on your Kitchen player. That's just 5 words. MrC wrote: > > - 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. Indeed. MrC wrote: > > - 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. We cannot reduce it to just "Play BBC World News" because that could potentially mean too many things. Is that a -favorite -radio station? Is it an -album -by Blur? Is it a -song -by Rod Stewart? It seems obvious to a human that this is a radio station, but the AI in voice assistants needs to disambiguate. The closest I can get you (without disappointment by targeting the wrong thing) is "Alexa, tell MediaServer to play favorite BBC Radio Three". Think of it as "Darling, tell the Milk Man we need 2 extra milks today". MrC wrote: > > - 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. The way Alexa works is that she hears what you say, decides on a skill that can handle it, and passes the parameters to the skill. If the commands were stripped from MediaServer but nevertheless spoken by the user, Alexa would merely redirect to a different skill (or music service) to process. So Amazon Music or TuneIn (as fallbacks) would be reacting instead of MediaServer, but it would still be a mess. Fact is, voice assistants (as you point out) need the user to remember pretty exact syntax or it's game-over. MrC wrote: > > - 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. That can only boil down to her not even launching MediaServer but answering via a different skill/service. If she 'forgot' the assumed player then MediaServer would fall back to first-run mode. You would have been told that an automatic player discovery was going to be performed. And your player names would have been read out. If that didn't happen, you didn't invoke MediaServer. MrC wrote: > > - 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. Amazon requires invocation for custom skills. An invocation name must be two words (Media Server in this case). Given those Amazon-enforced restrictions, what might work better? Also, what's the alternative? A teacher in front of a class asks a question. All the kids raise their hands. If she wants little Johnny to answer, she has to specify that. This is no different... My own biggest personal gripe with Alexa is lack of tolerance for any humming-and-hawing. One slight slip in a long command and it all goes south. Hopefully that will improve over time. The whole concept of AI is very over-hyped and the actual intelligence under the hood often leaves a lot to be desired, so we still have a ways to go :rolleyes: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ philchillbill's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=68920 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
