Alice - Yandex voice assistant
Alice works on tens of millions of devices from different manufacturers. Alice's technologies allow you to take user interaction with your services and devices to a new, natural level - a voice dialogue. Everything that Alice can do is collected in the skills catalog. Our Project is also in this directory, but for the time of testing it is available only by invitation links (through technical support).
Possibilities of integration with the Yandex ecosystem
1. Get information about the status of devices and sensor readings in the project (your own and favorites) in the mobile application "Home with Alice", on the computer in Yandex.Browser and using Yandex.Station voice commands.
2. Send commands from the Yandex smart home to the devices in the Project via Alice's app and Yandex browser, including voice.
3. Import devices with sensors from Yandex smart home to monitor them in the Project.
4. Automatically transfer data from the project to the Yandex smart home for use in Alice's scenarios.*
* available for commercial clients and Project partners.
Limitations of Yandex smart home integration
Limitations of our project:
1. To add a device from a Yandex smart home to a project, you must have a positive limit of private devices in the project.
2. Scenarios for Alice will only work if sensor readings are regularly transmitted to Yandex, which, due to resource intensity, is only possible for partners and commercial clients of the project.
Limitations of the Yandex smart home platform:
1. Devices and rooms must be named in Cyrillic in the Yandex UD (there is no such restriction in the project).
2. Each device can have only 1 sensor of each type. The selection of sensors is determined by the sorting order of sensors in the project (from top to bottom).
3. The list of sensor types is very limited, there is no custom type. The full list of supported types is in the Yandex.Dialogs documentation.
4. Sending complex commands to devices is impossible, only switching on/off the state of logical outputs.
5. The ability to request historical data from the supplier (our project) in the “Home with Alice” application is not provided, nor are smart home API methods for this implementation.
6. When you launch the “Home with Alice” application, the data of devices and sensors from the supplier without a subscription does not update, despite formal support for this feature both in the project and in the Yandex UD API.
7. The Yandex UD concept does not provide for shared access to data from one device, so each device can have only one "observer", which imposes restrictions on the ability to regularly update data from other people’s devices.
PS Dear users of the Project, we have already contacted Yandex UD support several times with a list of shortcomings and wishes; they were accepted for consideration more than a year ago, but nothing was actually done. If you are interested in eliminating these restrictions, write to the support service of the dialogue platform (Alice), if there are many requests, the chances of implementation increase.
Setting up Project integration with Yandex smart home
1. You need to authenticate on the Project website, then in the Sensors \ Settings section, click on the "Alice" link and provide the necessary permissions for the Yandex account to which your smart home is linked. In the dialog that opens, you can select sensors to import from Yandex UD to our Project.
2. For devices whose data is planned to be uploaded to YSH (for example, for scenarios), check the "Upload to Alice's smart home" box (Sensors \ Settings) and fill in the "Room" field and name the device itself in cyrillic (latin is not accepted by Yandex).
3. Install the "Home with Alice" application (or similar from Yandex) from the app store for your smartphone.
4. In the "Home with Alice" application, in the "Add devices" section, find the "IoT Public Monitoring" skill and "Link to Yandex".
5. Next, configure the names of the devices and rooms according to the setup wizard in the Alice application.
6. After adding new devices or sensors to the project, you should "Update the list of devices" of the "IoT Public Monitoring" skill in the "Home with Alice" application.
Important! By default, the unloading of readings from the Project to Yandex SH is carried out only upon request from Yandex applications, but for Alice's scenarios to work, automatic unloading is required, which is available only to those who have paid for a VIP subscription in the Project in the "Services" section.
Frequently Asked Questions about Integration
1. Why is the Russian name of the devices needed?
This is necessary to call the device through Alice.
2. Why weren't all the sensors on the device added?
Yandex's smart home concept considers that one device can have no more than one sensor of the same type.
3. How can I select the sensor on the device that will be added to the Yandex ID?
Sensors are added to display orders in the instrument menu on the Project site. Sensors in the list can be swapped by simple drag and drop.
4. Why is there no radiation sensor?
This type of data (property) is not in Yandex EA.
5. Why do I have "foreign" sensors?
Thus, sensors from Favorites are added. If you don't need them, you can delete them.
6. Why is the data not updated on the general instrument page?
Without the option to transfer data to Yandex EA, to update the readings on the device, you must explicitly click on it in the application.
7. Why were only my public sensors added from the Project?
Sensors are added to display orders in the instrument menu on the Project site. Public sensors are usually located at the top. Sensors in the list can be swapped by simple drag and drop.
8. Can Project sensors be used in Yandex scripts?
Yes, you can, you need to enable the option "Upload to Alice's smart home (Yandex)" in the device menu in the Project. The option is available only for commercial clients and Project partners.
9. Is it possible to get the history from Project sensors in Yandex UD?
Yandex does not have a method for requesting historical data, so data is transmitted only in real time. To do this, you need to enable the option "Upload to Alice's smart home" in the device menu in the Project. The option is available only for commercial users and Project partners.
10. Why can't I see my sensors from the Project?
Most likely, the wrong Yandex account was linked.
11. What commands are available for management?
Commands are currently available to change the state of one GPIO on the device. If there is an appropriate metric and command management is enabled, the option is added to Yandex EA automatically.
12. Why don't the sensor values match in the Project app and in the Yandex application?
Without the option to transfer data to Yandex EA, to update the readings on the device, you must explicitly click on it in the application.
13. Why are current values transmitted non-negative?
Yandex UD supports only positive values for the "Current" parameter.
14. Why does Alice not respond adequately to devices called "meteo", "weather station", "street", etc.?
It looks like keywords reserved by Yandex for their tasks. For more convenient work, you can change the name of the device in the Yandex application.
15. Why are commands processed slowly on the device? How to speed up?
The reaction speed depends on many factors, starting with the firmware of the device, its communication channel and protocol, the current loading of the Project server and the Yandex API.
When using the MQTT protocol, commands are processed in an average of 2-5 seconds.
16. How to become a Project sponsor?
Support the Project financially for more substantial amounts than with standard payments or provide services to the Project with an equivalent value.