Has Your Alexa Gone Mute?

[gviliunas]

After a Polisy reboot a few weeks ago, I am no longer hearing Alexa speak her Routing driven notifications. Only these Routines are affected.

Polisy continues to respond to commands from Alexa ("Alexa - Turn on XYZ light" works)

The Portal page says Polisy is connected. 

I have tried unlinking, relinking, and login to the V3 Alexa Skill. Routines seem to work locally via the app. State variable mapping in the portal appear to be correct. I don't know how to check if the State variable change is getting to the Portal and then onto Alexa.

One thing that I noticed is that Slot 1 of my plugins list is Empty. I vaguely remember this Slot originally assigned to the UD Portal. Is this correct?

Is anyone else seeing this problem?

ISY version: 5.8.4        PG3x version: 3.2.27

Edited July 31 by gviliunas

[roblombardo]

All good here. If I remember correctly, the portal at slot 1 was deprecated. I remember removing it, but cannot remember the procedure.

[Northwoods Ranger]

This happened to me and I think the original issue was resolved. If it still not working for you it may have been something else. Spoken notifications came back for me without touching anything, but it did take a couple of days before it happened.

 

[Geddy]

9 hours ago, gviliunas said:

Is anyone else seeing this problem?

Not recently. As @Northwoods Ranger said above there were some issues a few days back, but UD fixed them (at least appeared to). I didn't have to do anything for the routines to run again. Perhaps it would be a good idea to reboot the Polisy (full power cycle). 

I've noticed a few times (as I think others have posted and commented as well) that Echo routines will sometimes not fire and it's apparently an Amazon/Echo issue when they update something underlying that breaks the routines coming from skills. They end up getting resolved randomly. It's somewhat a goofy system (IMO) and sometimes I don't consider it very reliable. I don't run any mission critical processes through Echo routines and rely more on notifications plugin and UD Mobile for alerts. To me relying on a 3rd party system is just begging for issues (as you describe). Sometimes it works...sometimes it doesn't. If I have an alert it's only going to be critical so I prefer to keep things within the IoX/PG3x system to send me alerts rather than sending out to Echo.

10 hours ago, gviliunas said:

I don't know how to check if the State variable change is getting to the Portal and then onto Alexa.

I'm not sure how to do this either, but I know if you look at the routine it does have a "View Activity" choice if you click on the three dots in the top right of the routine (I'm on iOS). In there you'll at least see if/when the routine was triggered.

How are you changing the variable to trigger the routine? If with program you could just "Run Then" or "Run Else" however you have the program setup and see if the variable triggers the routine. 

 

If it's a big issue for your system you might be better off submitting a support ticket so UD can help track the issue with you.

https://www.universal-devices.com/my-tickets

 

[auger66]

On my eisy, Alexa routines work correctly. However and as @Geddy said, many times over the last several years on my eisy and previous ISY, Alexa stopped working. Fortunately, Alexa is not really important to my system.

Every time I can remember, it's been on Amazon's end. I always rebooted the UD device just because. That typically didn't work, so I waited a few weeks for it to come back up. Sometimes it did. If it didn't, I deleted the skill and reinstalled. That usually did the trick. I personally don't think Alexa is a priority for Amazon.

[bmercier]

23 hours ago, gviliunas said:

One thing that I noticed is that Slot 1 of my plugins list is Empty. I vaguely remember this Slot originally assigned to the UD Portal. Is this correct?

This was probably the Portal's Occupancy Node server.

On my.isy.io, Select Tool | Occupancy Node Server | Configure, you can configure or remove the configuration.

Slot 1 has no particular meaning. When you configure Occupancy, this will use the first slot available. That's probably what you had there.

[Northwoods Ranger]

One other thing to keep in mind when running down perceived Alexa failures is the inherent/imposed throttling of all the devices involved by their built-in reset time, including the throttling that Amazon imposes on notifications.

In my case I have a driveway monitor that includes an alarm with a built in low-voltage relay that is connected to an Insteon I/O Linc 2450 controller. The I/O Link is what initiates program execution and that in turn sends out my notifications. Currently those include Alexa spoken notifications at the house and Pushover push notifications to my phone.

A couple of observations.  One, each device employed has a defined “reset” period where it will wait for this period to expire before being able to do its thing again. In my case, across all of the devices involved, this is fractions of a second up to a 4 second wait. The issue comes in where there are multiple trips of the driveway sensor received in quick succession. The built in “reset” time will generally still be counting down it’s reset period while the sensor is trying to convey it’s next closely spaced trip.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that once you have this entire process optimized as best you can, you still end up having to deal with Amazon’s API limitations. Amazon limits the number of spoken notifications that can be sent in a specific time period. Exceed that, and all indications are that some sort of throttling is applied. The only reference I could find was the following: “Amazon limits the number of notifications that Alexa skills can send to customers in a 24-hour period through the Proactive Events API. Amazon may adjust this limit based on customer feedback. Notification API: Trigger events can only create notifications up to five times in a five-minute period. After that, Amazon will put you in a time-out.”

In the end, where a multiple trip scenario is playing out, Pushover will always register closer to the actual number of alarm trips than the Alexa spoken notifications. Largely I suspect due to the time it takes to process the Alexa notification and then the imposed throttling described above.

 

Just some things to consider when creating your own notification scheme…

[gviliunas]

Thanks to everyone for your advice.  @Geddy, I was testing by just manually changing the variable value from the State Variable list. Previously this worked.

I agree the Alexa system seems rather shaky with things working, not working, and then working again after weeks. I'll just wait for awhile and see if she starts getting chatty again.

[Northwoods Ranger]

And here we go again, Alexa notifications are no longer working for me while Pushover alerts seem just fine. For me, Alexa spoken notifications are triggered by toggling a variable. The programs involved haven't changed in over a year but work/don't work for days at a time. Running the routines from my phone and from the Alexa app produces the expected result. 

Hopefully resolved (again) soon...

 

Regards

[mmb]

1 hour ago, Northwoods Ranger said:

And here we go again, Alexa notifications are no longer working for me while Pushover alerts seem just fine. For me, Alexa spoken notifications are triggered by toggling a variable. The programs involved haven't changed in over a year but work/don't work for days at a time. Running the routines from my phone and from the Alexa app produces the expected result. 

Hopefully resolved (again) soon...

 

Regards

Same, routines are sporadic at best. We haven't changed anything in months.

Maybe it has something to do with the impending rollout of their new Alexa (Claude) AI.

[gviliunas]

For me, Alexa remains mute.....I am waiting for the Claude dust to settle before jumping into this further. This sounds like a cold winter day project. Maybe a local mp3-playing device would be better outbound solution rather than suffering hear-today-gone tomorrow Alexa-speak.  Do they make these recording doorbells anymore??? 

[paulbates]

The yolink hub 2 offers speaking phrases if you have yolink devices. I've thought about it as mine is located in the main living area. Not sure if there is an audio out though for larger scale projects

Michel has an audio plug-in for this purpose. You'd need some hardware but worth a look.

[gviliunas]

Thanks @paulbates I'll look into these

[gviliunas]

SHE  HEARD ME! @paulbates @Northwoods Ranger

Since July 31, Alexa's voice had been dead to me! Yesterday, I responded to Paul Bates that I would look into the alternative he suggested. This Morning........She's back chatting her morning greeting to me. 

Here's another solution to Alexa problems: Threaten to REPLACE HER.    ☹️😮🤣 

 

I did absolutely nothing. No reboots. Not even logging into the Admin Console.

Edited September 10 by gviliunas

[Northwoods Ranger]

Hey, thanks for the heads up!  I can confirm that she is back this morning and like you, I never touched a thing.

It would be good to understand just how broken this functionality is in order to determine its future use in new development. I'm just having problems with this functionality randomly failing for days at a time and then magically restored without knowing the "why".

Regards,