Often get "I have difficulty contacting your skill"

[apollon77]

Hey,

I'm currently trying out My Media (in german) since two days and basiclly it works great,

But from time to time my Alexa device answers with "I have difficulty contacting your skill" (Ich habe Schwierigkeiten Deinen Skill zu kontaktieren). It can be that it works directly before and directly afetrwards. It feels like it happens more often when I send multiple requestions one after each other, but also sometimes for a request.
In these cases the request is not shown in the MyMedia Web Frontend ...

My Media is running on my always running Synology NAS in a Docker Container.

What can I do to get more details on the error or is this known?also happening for others?

Ingo

[bizmodeller]

Hi,

Best thing is to email the exact time (and time zone) that the "i have difficulty contacting your skill" message arrives and the linked Amazon account id - we can then look at the Amazon side logs

thanks

[apollon77]

Ok, will do when I do next tests Thank you for the fast response

[apollon77]

Happened earlier (20:26-20.34 GMT +0200, german summertime) ... send you email

[bizmodeller]

Thanks for the details - we have put in a fix and this issue should be resolved now - please let us know!

[apollon77]

Looks good, Do not had problem again since the fix!

thumbs up

[bizmodeller]

Great - sorry for any inconvenience

[tiggerific]

I am having this happen on Sonos.
I know it doesn't support everything, but I get this same message every time if I try to use Skip or Pause. I know these functions work with other apps/skills.
After some back and forth, the music keeps playing and Alexa doesn't know she's playing anything. I ask her what song is playing and she says "I'm not playing any tracks"

It also seems that she gets more hard of hearing when using My Media than she does while doing anything else. That's regardless of the actual volume level.

[bizmodeller]

hi -for Sonos, this is a different issue.

When you say 'next' on a regular Alexa device, Alexa sends a 'NextIntent' onto your custom skill. This message includes a special token which tells the skill what the currently playing stream is. We can then take this token to lookup the current playlist and find the next track. The idea is that Alexa is meant to keep track of where a device is in a playlist, not 'us'.

When Alexa enabled Sonos devices sent a 'NextIntent', they don't send this token so we can't look up the playlist. We weren't handling this error well - now you should get an error saying we couldn't extract the playback token - which still isn't great. Unfortunately Sonos don't give us an easy way to contact their Alexa development team (we have reached out several times). We'll keep trying and think of ways around this ourselves, but really Sonos should be sending the playback token when they send AudioPlayer interface commands including navigating to the next track as per https://developer.amazon.com/docs/alexa ... layer.html