Question about changing default skills

I just ran across Mycroft and I have a couple of questions before I dive in. I have an extensive HA system running on homeseer. Assuming I can get the two talking which doesn’t look too difficult based on the documentation, can I modify default skills.

For example, can I alter “raise volume” to not turn up the volume on playback on the mycroft speaker, but instead to communicate with homeseer to adjust the volume running through my whole house audio system. For this to work, homeseer would need to receive the command, know which room it came from, and it can easily do the rest.

Having this would be a game changer for me - I am currently using Alexa throughout the house but the clunky skills implementation with Amazon requires that a user say “Alexa, tell homeseer to raise the volume”. This is never going to happen with my family, especially when they don’t know or care what homeseer is!

Mycroft is very hackable so yes it is possible to modify skills. You may also be interested in creating your own skills to interface with homeseer then share it with the community! I am sure some people will find that incredibly useful.

sorry, old thread, but did you get mycroft to work with Homeseer? and if so can you help me by how? I am very new, and haven’t really done much programming, so not sure where to start.

I did not pursue at the time but I am still very interested in this. At present we use Alexa for only a handful of basic commands, and even some of these I have had to employ a hack that requires a browser open all of the time on my homeseer server reading the Alexa log and processing the commands. The ultimate test for me is the volume up and down. If I could tell mycroft to raise the volume in a room and have it talk to homeseer to accomplish this command then I would order 5 of them tomorrow.

got ya. Yeah, I’ve been using the Alexa and it works for what I need it to, but there are just some custom things I want to do, that the Mycroft seems to have.

I have zero experience with homeseer but I did notice there are some python wrappers on GitHub. I would think that if you could get this Python command line program to do what you want then getting Mycroft to execute the same via voice would be a breeze.

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Hi there @jjohnston7 great to have you with us and thanks for your interest in Mycroft.

To create a new Skill for Mycroft, you will need to know some basic Python programming Skills - just like for AWS you need a basic understanding of Lambdas.

Why not suggest Homeseer as a Skill on our Skill Suggestion area - that way others can see if they would like to join in to help build in Homeseer support?

I don’t know python either but this looks fairly straightforward. I will post in the homeseer forum also to see if anyone there has any thoughts.

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