Alexa Voice Control

Summary

Publish a single Selora Alexa Smart Home Skill in Amazon’s developer console so that homeowners can control their Home Assistant installation with voice commands — “Alexa, turn off the lights in the kitchen.”

The skill is written and certified once by Selora, then serves every customer. When a homeowner links their account, Amazon sends directives to a hosted endpoint we run, which routes each directive to the right customer’s Selora remote URL using their existing Selora Connect account linking as the OAuth provider. There is no per-customer skill, no customer-side configuration, and no third-party dependency beyond what Selora already hosts.

The routing layer is the only real engineering here. The rest is Amazon paperwork — the developer-console registration, the hosted endpoint, and the smart-home-skill certification review.

Why This Is Straightforward

Everything that is hard about this is infrastructure Selora already has:

• Authentication — Selora Connect already handles per-customer OAuth account linking. The skill reuses that to establish who is talking before any directive is honored.
• Remote access — Selora already provides secure, on-demand remote access to each customer’s Home Assistant installation (Local HTTPS / remote access). The endpoint talks to the customer’s installation over the same channel the platform already supports.
• Hosting — the routing endpoint is a standard hosted service (an AWS Lambda function is a natural fit), deployed and operated by Selora and shared by all customers.

So the only net-new engineering is the routing layer: take an Alexa directive, look up which customer and which Home Assistant device it applies to, and forward it.

How It Works

1. A homeowner enables the Selora skill in the Alexa app and signs in with their Selora Connect account.
2. Amazon’s smart-home framework establishes the customer’s account authorization via our OAuth endpoint.
3. When the customer speaks a command, Amazon sends a directive to our hosted endpoint (Lambda).
4. The endpoint resolves the directive to the customer’s installation and the target device, then forwards the command to their Home Assistant over the existing remote-access channel.
5. State changes (a switch flipped, a sensor triggered) are reported back through Selora so the skill’s device list stays in sync with the live home.

Components

• Selora Alexa Smart Home Skill — a single skill published in Amazon’s developer console, representing all Selora customers.
• Hosted routing endpoint — a serverless function (AWS Lambda or equivalent) that receives Alexa directives and routes them to the correct customer’s Selora remote URL. This is the core engineering piece.
• Account linking / OAuth — the existing Selora Connect OAuth provider reused to bind an Alexa account to a Selora customer identity.
• Amazon smart-home certification — the review Amazon requires before the skill can be published and listed.

What Belongs in the Roadmap

• Define the device/scope model the skill exposes (which Home Assistant entities appear in Alexa and how).
• Design the routing layer: directive → (customer, device) → forward, including authentication checks, error handling, and timeouts.
• Reuse and extend the existing Connect OAuth flow for Alexa account linking.
• Prepare the Amazon developer-console submission and pass the smart-home-skill certification review.
• Operate the hosted endpoint (monitoring, scaling, cost) as a shared Selora service.

Out of Scope

• Per-customer skill authoring or configuration — the single skill serves everyone.
• Building new remote-access or authentication infrastructure from scratch — we reuse Selora Connect.
• Third-party-hosted voice dependencies — the endpoint and account linking are hosted and shared by Selora.

Success Criteria

• The Selora skill is published in the Amazon developer console and passes Amazon’s smart-home certification.
• A homeowner can link their Selora Connect account and control Home Assistant devices with natural-language Alexa commands.
• Directives are routed to the correct customer’s installation and the correct device, with state reflected back into the skill’s device list.

References

• Home Assistant — Alexa integration

Related Epics

• Secure Remote Access: Home Assistant
• Local HTTPS Support for Home Assistant
• Selora AI Cloud gateway