Create your own commands for Amazon Echo and Google Home

Amazon Echo and Google Home are the leaders in the field of smart hub speakers. The list of commands supported by Amazon and Google speakers is growing, but if you find that some features are missing, you have another option – create your own commands.

The easiest way to create a custom Amazon Echo or Google Home command is to use IFTTT (If This Then That), a free service that connects a variety of other services and applications – you can use it to bring you Copy Facebook status updates to Twitter, or send weather reports to your phone, or log your fitness tracking statistics to Google Drive, and more.

You can also use it to create custom commands for Alexa on Amazon Echo or Google Assistant on Google Home. After creating a free IFTTT account, click on the avatar in the upper right corner, select "New Applet" and it will start running.

This web application will guide you step by step in the process of creating your own Alexa commands. Select Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant as the "this" section of Applet, and select the option marked "Say a specific phrase" (Amazon) or "Say a simple phrase" (Google).

In the process, you need to log in with your Google or Amazon account so that IFTTT can successfully connect to your smart speaker.

Enter the phrase you want to use, after setting the command, you need to say the phrase after "Alexa Trigger" or "OK ​​Google", depending on the speaker you are using, and then click "Create Trigger".

For Google Assistant, there are some additional options available: you can specify up to two alternative voice commands to start the same function, and you can specify what the Google Assistant should say in response.

For the effects part of the process, your options are very wide. For example, you may want to start flashing your Philips Hue light or perform other actions around your smart home device. You can also use voice to control external services such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Email, Spotify, and more. There are many options you can choose from.

You can create a voice command to play songs, or text a friend, or unlock the smart lock on the front door. For example, to create an Echo command that calls you (in case it is lost somewhere), select Phone Call as your action.

For Google Home, you can add text or digital "ingredients" when creating an Applet, which can then be used in subsequent actions. The text ingredient may be the tweet you want to post, or the digital ingredient may be the temperature you want to set the thermostat.

So, to create a Google Home command to send tweets, select Twitter as your action and select "Post Tweet." The {{TextField}} component (the word you said after the voice command trigger) should have been filled in as the tweet text. You can adjust these examples to your needs.

This is an easy option, but if you have an Android phone and some spare cash, you can also use Tasker ($2.99) and AutoVoice plugin ($2.49). The process is a little more complex, but you have more flexibility in the commands you can create – for example, you can turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on your phone, or show popups on your phone, or in the music app Some music started playing in the program.

First, you need to connect to AutoVoice. For Google Home, open the Home app menu, and select More Settings, and then select Services. For Amazon Echo, visit this page on the web to add skills to your smart speakers.

After you complete this, open the AutoVoice app on your phone, click "AutoVoice Device", and select the account you have also registered on the speaker. In Tasker, click the plus button at the bottom, then click "Event", then click "Plugin", then click "AutoVoice", and then click "Recognition".

Click the pencil icon next to the "Configuration" title, and then click "Command" to set the voice prompt you want to use. Which voice prompts you can use is up to you, although you may want to avoid using anything that is too similar to what the speaker has already performed.

When you do this, you can link the created commands to any action in Tasker—from changing your phone settings to launching the app to mute the volume. Like IFTTT, you can choose from a lot of different actions – perhaps the best place to learn all of them is the Tasker website.

As we said, it's more complex and limited to Android, but for more adventurous users, Tasker does reward you with the time and effort you put in. For more help, check out the video tutorials created by Tasker creators.

For the rest of us, connecting IFTTT is an easy and free way to extend the capabilities of Amazon Echo or Google Home speakers if a third-party developer has not released a skill or action that can perform the action you are looking for.

The above is the detailed content of Create your own commands for Amazon Echo and Google Home. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!