How to trigger any specific intent without any user voice or touch interaction

amazon-alexa
#1

Hi,
I have created an amazon alexa skills. I will show the list of upcoming events to the users. In background for getting the list of events, called an api and triggered an intent on the launch. I have used APL in this case, but can you please tell me how can I retrigger the intent from the skills in every 10 mins without any user invocation so that user can see last events list even if he keeps the echo show device idle.

#2

Hey @parth. Welcome to the community.

As far as I know it’s not possible.

#3

Thanks @AlexSwe
Ok, can proactive event concept help me here?

#4

Welcome @parth! I dont think proactive events will help either and there is any other way to do this.

#5

Thanks @dominik-meissner for the clearance. Can you suggest me any other better approach for this use case.

#6

If I understand right… Alexa closes idle connections. One way to cheat that would be to use a streaming API (as though you were playing music) .

You would need a codec “loop server” that would be dynamically generating soft background music on loop but every 10 minutes, splice in the update message. The challenge is that your message needs to be spliced in as audio rather than simple SSML. Maybe you could use Amazon “Polly” service to generate the update snippets. It’s not easy but it is theoretically possible.

#7

The debugger manages to send requests to the skill… I find myself wondering whether the skill could “self-debug”, using this channel to submit text requests back through the system to itself. (I’d already been wondering whether that could be kluged into letting a skill front-end other skills…)

#8

That way you would keep the server alive, the Debugger has nothing to do with the platform. Keeping a skill alive for more than 10 minutes without user invocation or interaction is bad design and therefore not recommended.