Skill creation checklist
Smart home skills are a special category of Alice skills that are intended to control your home devices by voice. For example, you can ask Alice to turn on the kettle, set the heater to a certain temperature, turn off the light in the children's room, or turn down the TV.
To create a smart home skill:
Features of smart home skills
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No activation phrase required. Smart home skills run as built-in Alice scenarios and don't require saying an activation phrase. For example: “Alice, turn on the kitchen light”.
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Account linking. To launch smart home skills, you need to link accounts. For a skill to control the manufacturer's smart devices (such as Xiaomi devices), it must have access to the user account in that manufacturer's system. Since Yandex Dialogs identifies its users via the Yandex ID API, you need to link the user's Yandex account to their account in the manufacturer's system for the skill to work. When the user taps Привязать к Яндексу (Link to Yandex), they are taken to the sign-in page. For more information, see How authorization works with a skill.
Before you start designing a skill, check out the smart home management concept.
Official and unofficial skills
Smart home skills are classified into two types:
- Official skills are created and supported by the smart device manufacturers. These skills are marked with a special
icon in the catalog. Devices that support official skills are shown on Yandex Market with the Alice badge. You can place the “Works with Alice” badge on marketing materials, packaging, and devices. See how to use the badge in the design rules. - Unofficial skills are created by third-party developers and companies. For example, you can create an unofficial skill to control devices manufactured by Foo. Your skill will be displayed in the catalog, but without a special icon. Yandex Market will show devices that support these skills without the Alice badge.
For a skill to be recognized as official:
- When creating a skill, set the Official skill attribute.
- In the skill parameters, specify your official contact information: your name, email, and your company website. This website will be displayed on the skill description page in the catalog, under Information. Please note: you need to confirm your rights to use the website for your Yandex Webmaster account.
- When designing a skill, remember that you can't use Yandex ID authorization for an official skill.
- Get your device certified.
When your skill successfully passes moderation, it's recognized as official and can be published.
After you publish an official skill, Yandex Market will show the Alice badge in the description of devices that support this skill.
About Yandex Smart Home
Alert
This document provides examples of requests and responses to illustrate the capabilities of the smart home platform. The examples use sample data.
Yandex Smart Home (or the smart home platform) allows users to control smart devices of various manufacturers by using:
Using the smart home platform, these services can:
- Get information about user devices.
- Get information about the status of user devices.
- Send commands to user devices (such as “Turn on the light”).
Yandex Smart Home can also receive notifications about changes in the manufacturer's device states and provides an API for controlling devices programmatically.
Resources
- Instructions
- What is account linking?
- OAuth 2.0 Specification
- Chat to discuss smart device skills
- Yandex Station support chatbot
- Alice skill development community
Frequently asked questions
How to create a smart home skill
See the instructions under Create a skill.