Genie Community Forum

Timers and alarms

Skill Suggestions
#1

hi all,
I think an important part of a virtual assistant is connected to the ability to manage timers and alarms.
I’m thinking about cooking timer for example: I’m cooking a recipe and it says “boil it for 30 minutes”, it could be very useful a timer I can set with my voice while doing everything else…
People having Alexa say “Alexa, set a timer: 30 minutes”

alarms could be useful too: I can have almond in my bedroom and set an alarm for next morning

and reminders too: I have to remember to pay car insurance, I can set a reminder for 1y from now to remember next date.
I suppose reminders could be managed by some calendar skill (as iCalendar one)

Thanks you for your attention, sorry for my poor English

1 Like
#2

I second this - this is a typical use case in my household: “set a 10 minute timer”

#3

Good news! These commands are supported in Genie 1.0:

  • set an alarm at (time)
  • set a timer for (interval)
  • set a reminder

Timers and reminders are managed as rules in Genie (see the My Rules tab)

#4

cool! I take it that’s not the version that we can use as part of the HA add-on, right? As ‘set a timer for 10 minutes’ or ‘set a 10 minute timer’ did not work for me.

#5

You’ll need Genie 1.0, which is currently under review if you use the official add-on repository. You can set up our third-party add-on repository meanwhile (guide)

#6

I am running edge-3fb172d, but since I have done a conversion in the conversation (which worked great, so thank you for that!) I am only getting results from Bing when I ask set a timer for 10 minutes:

image
image758×321 27 KB

what am I doing wrong here?

#7

Oh right, the very latest edge version of Genie is talking to the old (production) cloud backend. It won’t work well until we deploy the new cloud backend in a couple days.

#8

I pushed a change to the edge add-on build to use the dev cloud backend (as it should). Can you try the latest edge add-on and see if it works for you?

#9

It’s working for me (using Edge), although the English of the reply is kind of wonky:

“Alright, I will timer expire in 10 minutes.”

Glad it’s working though! Setting timers is honestly the most common actual use I’ve seen for voice assistants.

#10

yeah, it works here now as well. The response is kind of weird, but the timer works. Thanks.

#11

Although the timer itself works for me it doesn’t play any sort of alarm or have any indication of the alarm on the client. I’m using the home assistant installation

#12

To clarify the notification shows up on the server but no indication of the alarm goes off on the client