Restart skill after AudioPlayer ends

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Anand Dev asked · Jun 21, 2018 at 11:42 AM

Restart skill after AudioPlayer ends

Hi,

I'm using the audio player sample code from here.

Is there a way, If I've reached the end of my playlist, I want the Alexa to tell if I'd like to restart the skill.

Please note it is not the looping of the skill. As I' getting the list of audio from a service based on some command by the user. I want to allow the user to command it again.

Even if the same session cannot be preserved, this would at least allow to continued interaction with the skill once a playlist is finished.

Any help will be highly apreciable.

alexa skills kit alexa voice service audio audioplayer

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2 Answers

Answer 1 · 2018-06-22T09:39:02Z

AndyW answered · Jun 22, 2018 at 09:39 AM · ACCEPTED ANSWER

Yes it does, thanks.

You won't be able to achieve what you're describing using the AudioPlayer interface as you can't pass speech output back to the Alexa system in response to a PlaybackFinished event.

As a workaround, you could add an MP3 at the end of each playlist with the MP3 content being the spoken phrase "You've reached the end of the topic, if you'd like to hear about another country then say Alexa, ask <your skill name> about a new country".

The dummy MP3 would then effectively prompt the user into invoking your skill again.

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Anand Dev · Jun 22, 2018 at 09:55 AM

Thank you so much for your valuable response.

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Answer 2 · 2018-06-21T14:30:44Z

AndyW answered · Jun 21, 2018 at 02:30 PM

What do you want to happen when the playlist end is reached ? You can't get Alexa to speak as there is no active user-session when the PlaybackFinished event is sent to your skill. The Amazon documentation is clear on this:

https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/audioplayer-interface-reference.html#playbackfinished

Valid Response Types

Your skill can respond to PlaybackFinished with a Stop or ClearQueue directive.

The response cannot include:

Any standard properties such as outputSpeech, card, or reprompt.
Any other AudioPlayer directives.
Any other directives from other interfaces, such a Dialog directive

So there's nothing you can do to initiate a voice interaction with the user when the playlist ends. You *could* use the NotificationAPI to send a notification to the user but that's about it.

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Anand Dev · Jun 21, 2018 at 05:47 PM

Hi AndyW,

Thank you for your comment.

Actually, I've created a custom slot having the values (such as India, China, US etc.) and at the launch of the skill user says "Alexa, get me about India", then I'm taking the slot value (India) and passing it to the GraphQL endpoint to get the list of audios available for this topic. Let us assume I got 4 audio in the list, then the skill is playing it one-by-one.

Now what I want is, When the playback finishes playing last audio in the list, I want the skill to allow the user to listen for another topic. Such as after finish playing last audio,
Alexa will say: You have reached at the end of the playlist, would you like to listen to another topic?

User says: "Yes, get me about China", and then the skill will start again.

Hope it clears my requirement.

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Restart skill after AudioPlayer ends

Valid Response Types

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