kevkha/mediacenterskill

An Alexa skill to communicate to a computer and play videos

Media Center Skills for Alexa

This is the repository for the Alexa Skill that allows you to control your Mac VLC-based media center using an Amazon Echo.

It allows for interaction such as "Alexa, tell kickass to play Elements by Lindsey Stirling" which will then query YouTube for the video and tell VLC to play it on your computer.

There is also a skill for querying your own media library if the files are organized well. You can find projects like Sickbeard or Sonarr which can organize your library in a way that this skill will understand.

Intent Schema and Interaction Model

The intent schema and interaction models found here are the ones that I've been using that work pretty well. There were issues with overloading the same invocation name, so we had to add more in order to handle each request better. The ones that I used were:

Invocation Name	Interaction Model	Feature
kickass	"tell kickass to play {youtube video query}"	Plays YouTube videos on VLC
kickass	"tell kickass to shuffle {youtube playlist query}"	Plays a YouTube playlist through VLC
the media center	"tell the media center to stop", "tell the media center to resume"	Controls playback commands. Accepts: stop, pause, resume, next, skip, go back
the library	"tell the library to shuffle {tv show name}"	Finds a tv show in your local library and plays a random episodes, also queues up others
plex	"tell plex to play {show} season {n} episode {m}"	Finds a specific episiode of a show in your library and plays it through VLC

I wrote a blog post about it which you can find here. If anyone actually uses this code I will improve this readme.