Brand new Alexa Capabilities, and skills

[Cozdabuch]

This post is copied from the ST community courtesy of @JcMarin.

Today, together with the new hardware announcement Amazon did of the Echo Plus, they have alos announced new features for their Smart Home Skill and API: Amazon Blog

A few interesting things that are new:

You can now send events to the Alexa Event Gateway
You can query and get status reports on device state
You can also send proactive updates on device status to Alexa
Send asynchronous messages directly from the cloud platform to Alexa
New Discovery of devices with new Capabilities details for each device

Hope ST is already working on updating the Alexa integration to take advantage of all of this new functionality, this could allow us, for instance to query device state (much like Ask Alexa) and send Events (like Door left open) to yur Echo devices.

Edit:

One more thing I missed and some just pointed out in another thread.

You can place your Echo devices into smart home groups and allow for smarter interaction like "Alexa turn on the light referring to the light in that specific Echo group! (ex. room)

Original post:

New Alexa Smart Home Skill API's