This is a (very) custom Alexa skill to interact with my Home Assistant instance. It was developed for my own usage (in Italian), but I tried to add comments explaining what all the phrases mean in English.

It enables me to:

• Check how long was the heating or a/c on today
• How much power is currently being used by a few rooms/devices/the whole house
• How much energy has been consumed by a few rooms/devices/the whole house today/in the last week/in the last month.

What you need to change

The most important thing is to implement the code that "generates" your entity ids based on what you need to check (for example today's whole-house energy usage). This is found in InstantPowerUsageIntentHandler, HistoricEnergyUsageIntentHandler. You should do the same in DurataRiscaldamentoClimaOggiIntentHandler to point to the entity you use to calculate the number of hours heating and air conditioning have been on for today. Don't forget the interaction models.

How to deploy

This skill is supposed to be deployed to AWS Lambda through ask-cli.

Adapt the code to fit your Home Assistant entities (be sure not to forget the interaction models), then deploy using:

ask deploy

(Maybe you need to first create your own skill with ask new and then copy the code over? I'm not really sure.)

Environment variables

In order to avoid having the Home Assistant API URL and Long-lived access token in the code, I supply them as environment variables to the Lambda function.

This is not really supported by ask-cli, but there's a workaround:

• Deploy the skill
• In your AWS Console, go to Lambda and then open the function that powers this skill
• Add two environment variables:
  • HASS_ENDPOINT should be something like https://my-home-assistant-instance.com/api
  • HASS_TOKEN is your Long-lived access token
• The next time you edit the code and try to deploy, ask-cli will complain that you changed something in the Lambda function. Ignore the error and deploy with ask deploy --ignore-hash. Your environment variables will be preserved.

Disclaimer

As I said, this was developed for my own usage, I then decided to spend a little time to document what I did and to publish the code here.