I have created a custom smart home skill to control several devices in my home. One of the devices is a pioneer amplifier which I report as a speaker device to Alexa. The device has the following capabilities:
At the moment my skill will always report the device as active and will respond to every event as handled successfully.
I need to specifically name the device for the first change of volume via Alexa: e.g. "Alexa, turn down the volume on amplifier" After that I can leave out the name ("Alexa, turn down the volume") and it will automatically send it to the right device/my skill. But after some time I will have to name the device again. The same doesn’t apply for my television. After starting it with Alexa I can keep the name out forever (or at least a long time). I can’t find anything in the developer documentation for the Alexa speaker interface. Is this something I can control with my skill or is this just some behaviour of Alexa we can’t control? I would like use the name of the device for the first time (or when its off) and as long as the device is on control it without the name.
Please note that this is an expected behaviour. The device name must be specified in the utterance for each interaction you have with Alexa, as described in the documentation here.
This is to avoid ambiguities, especially if you control several devices with your skill and if some of them use the same Alexa.Speaker interface.