Long time no blog post, sorry. I have meant to write this post forever but I have managed to avoid it.
Anyways, consider the scenario when you sit in your couch and you wonder: - “What’s the temperature in my fridge?” - “Did I close the door?” - “What’s the humidity?”
You have already installed your Electric Imp hardware in the Fridge (Best Trailhead Badge Ever) and it’s speaking to Salesforce via platform events, you even get a case when the temperature or humidity reaches a threshold or the door is open for too long.
But what if you just want to know the temperature? And you don’t have time to log into Salesforce to find out.
Alexa Skills to the rescue!
Thanks to this awesome blog post: https://andyinthecloud.com/2016/10/05/building-an-amazon-echo-skill-with-the-flow-api/
And this GitHub repository: https://github.com/financialforcedev/alexa-salesforce-flow-skill
And example Flows from here: https://github.com/financialforcedev/alexa-salesforce-flow-skill-examples
I’ll walk you through what’s needed to speak to your fridge.
I will only show the small pieces you need for setting this up, for details please read the original blog posts.
First of all you need an Alexa Skill, I have created one called Salesforce.
This is the interaction model:
{
"intents": [
{
"intent": "FridgeStatus"
}
]
}
And the Sample Utterances
FridgeStatus How is my fridge
I’ll not go into details about Lambda and the connected app needed, please refer to this documentation: https://github.com/financialforcedev/alexa-salesforce-flow-skill/wiki/Setup-and-Configuration
The important thing here is the FridgeStatus in the Sample Utterances, you’ll need a flow called FridgeStatus.
Here’s mine:
Going into details:
And creating the response:
The Value is:
Your fridge temperature is {!Temperature} degrees celcius, the humidity is {!Humidity} percent, and the door is {!DoorStatus}
The result sounds like this: [audio m4a=“/media/Fridge-status.m4a”][/audio]
So the next time you wonder about the temperature in the fridge you won’t have to move from the couch, awesome right?
The next step would be to ask Alexa about “What’s the average temperature during the last day?” and calculate the average from the BigObjects holding my temperature reading.
Cheers, Johan