Controlling a TiVo DVR with the Amazon Echo

I wrote a demo skill for the Amazon Echo that lets me control my TiVo Bolt DVR with Alexa's voice commands. It's not perfect, but as a proof-of-concept I think it's pretty cool. Hopefully in the future TiVo (Rovi?) and Amazon will provide an official Alexa skill for something like this.
You can find the project here: github.com/jra...

[@voyeur113]

This might be useful for a paraplegic but it is much more effort than just pushing remote buttons

[@TheCogwithNoBoundries]

Hi Jeremy a instruction video from start to finish would be good on how to use this because its way over many peoples heads .....too complicated for the non computer language buff

[@JeremyRadwan]

Not going to happen, sorry. As mentioned below, I have extensive installation instructions on the Github repo page here:
github.com/jradwan/alexa_tivo_control/wiki/Installation-Instructions
And I'm not working on this skill anymore anyway since TiVo has their own official skill.

[@ronholl1]

I agree, this is pretty cool. I looked at the code and install instructions, think it may be kind of complicated for me to set up an application server to host this (assuming that is what it is asking for). Is there any way to set this up using the Alexa Developer Console, maybe a Lambda Function, whatever that is. Any suggestions?

[@rmrandy]

I haven't dug into the code, but if like other custom Alexa skills, I would assume you can run it from AWS developers account.

[@JeremyRadwan]

I don't think it will work running as a Lambda function (easily). In order for the skill to send the remote codes to the TiVo, it needs to be able to "see" the TiVo's telnet interface on the network. I guess theorectically if you did some port forwarding you could get it to work, but that would expose your TiVo to the internet-at-large. I haven't really played around with that.

[@ronholl1]

Thanks Jeremy and rmrandy for those responses. Makes sense it would be doable with a server on the network. This does seem like something I would want to get to work but would require some overhead on my part. Like I said, it is very cool and I would hope TIVO could come through with something to do this some time.

[@mjjdesigns]

Your github link is broken. Can you share your code?

[@JeremyRadwan]

The link seems to be fine: github.com/jradwan/alexa_tivo_control. You also try the original repo here: github.com/grgisme/alexa_tivo_control and then go to my fork from there.

[@mjjdesigns]

Weird. Didn't work from my iPad. Okay on Mac. Thanks for sharing, will give it a whirl!

[@JeremyRadwan]

Updated video here: ruclips.net/video/UurlNvZ-OWM/видео.html

[@brycefrazier8173]

WAAAAAY too much talking. Can the commands be abbreviated to remove unnecessary words?

[@JeremyRadwan]

I wrote this skill almost four year years ago and that was the best (only?) way at the time to use the skill. I'm sure the official TiVo skill handles this better by now. :)

[@gkess7106]

So no instructions on how to connect them! 👎

[@JeremyRadwan]

I have extensive installation instructions on the Github repo page here:
github.com/jradwan/alexa_tivo_control/wiki/Installation-Instructions
But now that TiVo has their "official" Alexa skill available, it's probably easier to use that.