How to tell if Alexa emits nothing?

Question

If I tell Alexa to emit text in certain languages (Chinese, Russian, etc.) or emojis, it will say nothing to the user. Does the Alexa API have a way to indicate a string will be converted to nothing/silence before or after emit? Alternately, is there a way to test the string outside of Alexa?

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 16 '18 at 01:28

You can check the Device Log in the test section of the developer's console for the string or SSML of Alexa's response.

For my case it's the Directive.DeviceSpeechSynthesizer.Speak log.

{
    "header": {
        "namespace": "SpeechSynthesizer",
        "name": "Speak",
        "messageId": "0a290293-fe8d-40a5-835e-25f2b2e605eb",
        "dialogRequestId": "aa432cda-079a-4e46-a831-55d9f212bb6c"
    },
    "payload": {
        "caption": "ok",
        "url": "some url",
        "format": "AUDIO_MPEG",
        "token": "some token",
        "ssml": "<speak><prosody volume=\"x-loud\">ok</prosody><metadata><promptMetadata><promptId>ExecuteAction.CommandExecuted</promptId><namespace>HomeAutomation</namespace><locale>en_US</locale><overrideId>default</overrideId><variant>a836f358-a86c-4e3f-94e9-fe2f3bb24c7d</variant><condition/><weight>1</weight><stageVersion>Adm-20170215_180306-27</stageVersion></promptMetadata></metadata></speak>"
    }
}

You will notice that the ssml contains the converted text.

Also there is a discussion about supporting another language in ssml response.

How to tell if Alexa emits nothing?

1 Answers1