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I'm trying to create some skills for my Echo (for my own use, I'm not concerned about the invocation names not getting through review). I've set my invocation name as "the car" (I also tried "car"). I wanted to be able to ask what my battery status is and order Alexa to pre-heat the car (a Renault ZOE).

It seems no matter what I put in for my utterances, I always get the same responses:

  • Anything with "battery" in gets "I don't have a battery"
  • Anything with "heat" in gets "You have no smarthome devices, blah blah"

It seems like the words "battery" and "heat" result in things never matching my skill (even when I said the invocation name).

Is there anything I can do so that it will route actions along the lines of the above to my skill?

Edit: Today I get different results trying "preheat the car".. I just get a weird tone. It never calls my skill, nor shows anything in the Home section of the app. What does this tone mean?

Video here: https://twitter.com/DanTup/status/804615557605654528

Danny Tuppeny
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  • So it sounds like your skill is never even getting invoked? Did you try invoking it from the testing tab of the skill configuration? – Tom Dec 02 '16 at 14:51
  • @Tom It worked fine in the dashboard, but you don't give a full command there (invocation name is missing) so it wasn't a real test. I was able to get things working reasonable well thanks to Reddit - see my answer. – Danny Tuppeny Dec 02 '16 at 15:56

2 Answers2

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With help from Reddit I managed to get this working reasonably well. the car was a bad invocation name and I wasn't following the documented way for invoking skills (joining words etc. are fairly restrictive).

I'm now using my car as the invocation name and can do the following:

  • Alexa tell my car to preheat
  • Alexa ask my car for battery
Danny Tuppeny
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As of Dec 2017, it's still not possible to have completely custom phrases with Alexa. Google Assistant/Home does support this however, via shortcuts.

Danny Tuppeny
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