Control your X10 Devices with the Amazon Echo using the Smart Home Skill API

Amazon Dot X10

In a previous post you’ve learned how to control your X10 devices using the Amazon Echo and the IFTTT service. But now Amazon allows you to code a Smart Home Skill so you can say Alexa turn on the lights instead of Alexa trigger lights on. It’s more convenient! Let’s extend the work we’ve already done to write a Smart Home Skill to natively manage your X10 devices.

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Using Self-Signed Certificates for Amazon Alexa Skills

Echo

If you want to implement your own Alexa Skills for your Amazon Echo and don’t intend to make them public, you can use a self-signed certificate for your web service where you host the skill.

I’ve been impressed on how many developers can’t make this work and have opted to use a Lambda function as a proxy, when it is very easy to create the self-signed certificate.

If you intend to publish your skill then you’d need to buy a SSL Certificate. These steps won’t help you.  You also need a real and trusted SSL Certificate if you want to host audio files to be used with the Audio SSML Tag.

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