About smart home

Smart home skills are a special category of Alice skills that are intended to control your home devices by voice. For example, a user 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.

Smart home skills don't require an activation phrase because they run as built-in Alice scenarios. For example: “Alice, turn on the kitchen light”.

Linking accounts is needed to launch smart home skills. To control smart devices from a certain manufacturer, like Xiaomi, the skill must have access to the user's 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 the user's account in the manufacturer's system to run your skill.

When the user taps Привязать к Яндексу (Link to Yandex), they are brought to the sign-in page. For more information, see How authorization within a skill works.

Before you start designing a skill, check out the smart home management concept.

Official and unofficial skills

There are two types of smart home skills:

• 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 or 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.

To have a skill recognized as official:

1. When creating a skill, set the Official skill attribute.
2. In the skill settings, 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.
3. When designing a skill, remember that you can't use Yandex ID authorization for an official skill.
4. Pass device certification.

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 that skill.

Useful links

• Steps to follow
• About account linking
• OAuth 2.0 specification
• Chat for discussing smart device skills
• Yandex Station support chatbot
• Alice skill developer community

Frequently asked questions