frijj2k/geemusic

A bridge between Google Music and the Amazon Alexa

Gee, Music!

GeeMusic is an Alexa skill which bridges Google Music and Amazon's Alexa. It hopes to rescue all of those who want an Echo/Dot but don't want to switch off of Google Music or pay extra for an Amazon Music Unlimited subscription.

This project is still in its early phases and subject to a bit of change, however it is functional and ready for use! The only catch is that you'll need to run it on your own server for the time being (ideally I'll eventually release this on the Alexa Skills marketplace, but there's a lot of work to do before then).

Note: This skill is not made by nor endorsed by Google. That being said, it is based off of the wonderful gmusicapi by Simon Weber, which has been around since 2012, so this should work as long as Google doesn't decide to lock down its APIs in a major way.

Features

What can this puppy do, you might ask? Here's a list of example phrases that you can try once you get GeeMusic up and running. Remember that each of these phrases needs to be prefixed with "Alexa, tell Geemusic to..." in order for Alexa to know that you're requesting music from GeeMusic, not the built-in music services. They're also fuzzy, so feel free to try slight variations of phrases to see if they'll work.

Currently Implemented

Play artist Radiohead
Play songs by LCD Soundsystem
Play top songs by Nujabes
Play music by A Tribe Called Quest

Play the album Science For Girls
Play album Plastic Beach
Play the album To Pimp A Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar
Play album and The Anonymous Nobody by De La Soul

Play the song Fitter Happier
Play song Cocoa Butter Kisses
Play the song Drunk Girls by LCD Soundsystem
Start a radio station for artist Weezer
Play some music (plays your I'm Feeling Lucky station)
Start playlist Dancy Party

What is currently playing?

Of course you can also say things like "Alexa stop," "Alexa next," etc.

Roadmap

Like this song
Dislike this song
Thumbs-up this song
Thumbs-down this song
Play the latest album by Run The Jewels
Skip to the 3rd song in this album
Play the third track off of In Rainbows
Play a station for bedtime
Play a station for partying

Known bugs:

• Pausing/resuming currently skips to the beginning of the song. Trust me, I know how annoying this is an I'm actively working on fixing it.

Setup

Let's cut right to the chase: how can you enable this skill on your own Dot/Echo? Unfortunately the process is a bit finicky, but I'll try to make it as simple as I can.

The following instructions have been tested on UNIXy environments, namely OS X, Arch, and Ubuntu. It's great if you are able to get this running on Windows, but if not please do not open an issue, as it is an unsupported environment.

Start a local development server

Let's start out by getting the GeeMusic server running on your machine. Before you get started, please note that this server must be running at all times and be publicly accessible to the internet in order for this skill to run. If the server shuts down the party stops.

First things first, clone this repository to your server:

$ git clone https://github.com/stevenleeg/geemusic.git

Next, cd in and install the dependencies, ideally within a virtualenv if you have it installed, but otherwise you can omit those steps and just run the pip install line. Note that some of the dependencies require Python's C headers (on Ubuntu these can be installed by running sudo apt-get install python-dev).

# Run this if you have virtualenv installed:
$ virtualenv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate

# Continue on if you have virtualenv or start here if you don't:
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Once the requirements are installed we'll need to create a file, .env to store our credentials. Here's an example:

# Google credentials
[email protected]
GOOGLE_PASSWORD=[password]

# Publicly accessible URL to your server, WITHOUT trailing slash
APP_URL=https://alexa-geemusic.stevegattuso.me

I would highly reccomend that you enable 2-factor authentication on your Google account and only insert an application specific password into this file. Remember that it is stored in plaintext on your local computer! (TODO: fix this!)

Now you need to create your SSL certificate files. To generate a self-signed certificate, issue the following commands:

$ openssl genrsa 1024 > server.key
$ chmod 400 server.key
$ openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -sha1 -days 365 -key server.key -out server.cert

You will need to fill in the certificate details when prompted.

Once you have your .env file ready to go and have generated your self-signed SSL certificate, let's start the server. I personally use Foreman to run the server, as it will automatically load the .env file into my environment and boot up the webserver. There are surely other ways of doing this, but if you'd like to follow my lead you can run gem install foreman.

Once foreman is ready to go, simply run

$ foreman start

and you should see your web server start at http://localhost:4000 (although it won't do much if you visit it with your browser).

Create a development skill on Amazon

Open up the Alexa Dashboard and click on the yellow "Add a New Skill" button in the top right corner.

Set the parameters on the "Skill Information" step as follows:

Field	Value
Skill Type	Custom Interaction Model
Name	Gee Music
Invocation Name	gee music
Audio Player	Yes

On the "Interaction Model" step, paste in the contents of speech_assets/intentSchema.json to the intent schema field and the contents of speech_assets/sampleUtterances.txt to the sample utterances field.

In the "configuration step" we'll point our skill at the URL for our development server. Select HTTPS as the endpoint type and enter your server's URL in the corresponding box. Remember that your development server must be publicly accessible AND using HTTPS in order for Amazon to be able to connect/interact with it.

If your development server is running on a server that is already available on the internet, type its URL (such as https://geemusic.example.com/alexa). Make sure you include the /alexa, otherwise this won't work!

If you are running the server on a computer behind a firewall we'll need to expose the server via a tunnel in order for this to work. I usually use ngrok for these situations and have used it to develop this project. To start a tunnel run ngrok http 4000 in a console window. You should then see a few URLs, one of which being a publicly accessible HTTPS link to your development server. Copy this URL, being sure to append /alexa so the final result looks something like https://[some-code].ngrok.io/alexa. Important: Make sure you update your .env file's APP_URL to this new URL, otherwise Alexa will not be able to stream music!

You'll also want to select "No" for the "Account Linking" field before moving on.

Now that your skill is set up, you should be able to skip the SSL step and move right into "Test". Once there, scroll down to the "Service Simulator" section, enter some text like Play album In Rainbows by Radiohead, click "Ask Gee Music", and you'll ideally see some resulting JSON in the Service Response box.

If all goes well the skill should also be up and running on your Echo/Dot! Take a look at the features section of this Readme to get an idea of what you can tell it to do.

Enjoy streaming Google Music via Alexa!

(Optional) Setup a Heroku instance

Setting up an instance on Heroku may be an easier option for you, and these instructions detail how to accomplish this. The following steps replace the need to setup a local server. First one must have Heroku setup on your local machine and an account associated. Visit the CLI documentation for details on setting this up.

One must then clone the repository.

$ git clone https://github.com/stevenleeg/geemusic.git

Next, cd in to deploy the code. Then, setup the Heroku server by typing the following two commands.

$ heroku create
$ git push heroku master

We now need to configure it to work with your Google account. Type the following commands, and replace details with your own account credentials and app settings.

$ heroku config:set [email protected]
$ heroku config:set GOOGLE_PASSWORD=[password]
$ heroku config:set APP_URL=https://[heroku_app_name].herokuapp.com

At this point, your server should by live and ready to start accepting requests at https://[heroku_app_name].herokuapp.com/alexa. Note, that while using the free tier, you may experience timeout errors when you server has received no requests for over 30 minutes.

Contributing

Please feel free to open an issue or PR if you've found a bug. If you're looking to implement a feature, please open an issue before creating a PR so I can review it and make sure it's something that should be added.

License

This project is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE.txt for more information.