Oracle Bots Nodes.js SDK: Controlling Smart Homes Using IFTTT Applets with Oracle Digital Assistant

Transcription

1 Oracle Digital Assistant TechExchange Article. Oracle Bots Nodes.js SDK: Controlling Smart Homes Using IFTTT Applets with Oracle Digital Assistant Stefan Wörmcke, February 2019 Digital assistants like Siri, Alexa & Co control your smart home: switch on lights, control heating and more. But can you do the same using Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA)? Or is Oracle Digital Assistant just an intelligent front end for integrating enterprise backend systems? The answer to both questions is a big and bold yes. It is the part where IFTTT (if-this-then-that) comes into play. IFTT provides a software platform that connects apps, devices, and services from different developers to trigger automation. In this article I explain how you create a custom component that connects to an IFTTT applet to control dimming the light from an Oracle Digital Assistant skill bot. How to Connect Oracle Digital Assistant to Smart Homes using IFTTT To provide support for smart homes with you need to create custom actions. An action is a configuration and webhook that becomes the remote endpoint for any device you want to use as a controller for your smart home. For this article, Oracle Digital Assistant becomes the smart home controlling software. In the context of a user conversation, the Oracle Digital Assistant bot can invoke a custom component (Node program) to access the ifttt actions. For a start, you define what triggers the action (THIS), then you define the action which should be carried out (THAT). This is called an IFTTT applet. Looking at IFTTT there are thousands of predefined applets ready to use: if it is going to rain tomorrow, send me an , get a notification when the international space station passes over my house, create a webhook which will close your garage door upon receiving a request, and so on. Webhooks also is what you use to connect Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) with IFTTT applets and the world of smart devices. To connect Oracle Digital Assistant with a smart home, you define an IFTTT applet with a webhook as trigger (THIS) and the action you want to carry out (THAT) 1 Oracle Digital Assistant TechExchange

2 create an Oracle Digital Assistant custom component to call the webhook register and use the custom component in your Oracle Digital Assistant bot conversation For this article, I will demonstrate in the following how an IFTTT applet can be used for Oracle Digital Assistant to switch lights on and off. I've written the sample to work within my apartment, which understandably I don't allow you to switch lights on and off. However, I made sure the implementation is written generic, so you can use the code for every IFTTT applet, which can be invoked via Webhooks! Note: The code samples for this article can be downloaded from Oracle TechExchange Step 1 Creating the IFTTT Applet Use your browser and navigate to and register for a free account, assuming you don't have one. Next you can start to create your first apple From the homepage navigate to My Applets and click on New Applet : Now start defining what triggers your action by clicking on the blue + THIS. Here you can search for the service which should trigger your action. Choose "webhook" Next you have to define your webhook: click on Receive a web request to start the configuration:

3 Note that for every webhook triggering an action, you need to define a unique name, in IFTTT terms an event. Later you will have to integrate this event name in the URL for the Webhook. Select toggle_lights as the name for the event and click the create trigger button What you just did: Following the few steps above, you created a webhook along with an associated action. Next you will define the action that should be carried out (the THAT part) when our webhook is invoked: Click on the blue + that to pick an action. You can choose from various actions which could be carried out by the applet upon activation, for this article you want to switch lights. The bulbs I I used in the sample are from LIFX, typing Li in the search box will narrow down the results:

4 Note: To adapt the sample to your own devices you have at home (e.g. bulbs from Philips or switches from WeMo), pick the corresponding service you want to activate via the webhook! The first time you pick a service (like the LIFX service), you will have to connect your IFTTT account with your LIFX account, so the applet can activate your lights via Webhooks. After connecting your LIFX with the IFTTT account, you can choose from various actions to carry out: In the sample, you want to toggle lights, so click on the corresponding box to define the details. In the next step, choose which lights should be toggled. For simplicity, just toggle all lights in your smart home:

5 Click on create action and finish the definition of your applet: Step 2: Retrieving the Webhook and your secret key For invoking the webhook from our custom component, you need a corresponding URL. Retrieving the URL for webhooks on the IFTTT website appears to be tricky. So here is the way to go: From IFTTT homepage, first navigate to My Applets. Then click on the tab services :

6 Next search for webhooks using the search box: Clicking on the Webhooks icon will take you to the webhooks section: Now click on settings, and copy the URL: Paste the URL ( into a new browser window to reveal the Webhook URL and your key:

7 This is the URL for the Webhook you need for the implementation of the custom component! Note the {event} field in the URL is the name of the event you defined before ( toggle_lights ) when defining the trigger fields for our IFTTT applet. Also take a note of your key, as you will need it when calling the custom component from the ODA. Note: Later, in the implementation of our custom component, you construct the final URL by passing the EVENT and MYKEY values as parameters, so you can reuse the custom component for every IFTTT applet you create in the future! Step 3: Build a Custom Component Service for the IFTTT Applet Building custom component service for Oracle Digital Assistant is covered in an earlier article on Oracle TechExchange. Please follow up with the link below to learn about building custom components. TechExchange - Tutorial: Building Custom Component Services for Oracle Digital Assistant in Under 5 Minutes with Oracle Bots Node.js SDK minutes-with-oracle-bots-nodejs-sdk In this article I am using Oracle Mobile HUB as a component service, which is explained in the following article: Oracle Bots Node.js SDK: Building Custom Component Services in and for Oracle Autonomous Mobile Cloud Made Easy

8 Here's in brief what the two articles explain in more detail: Go to Mobile Cloud Service (which just has been rebranded to 'Oracle Mobile Hub') and create a new custom API. Name the e.g. ifttt, set security options to that no login is required, and from the implementation menu item, download the javascript scaffold. Unzip the javascript scaffold, and install the Oracle bots SDK in the extracted ifttt folder ( npm install ). Next create a components folder, and within that folder a new folder named e.g. lights. For implementation of the metadata() and invoke() function, create a file named e.g. lights.js. Your directory structure should by now look similar like this:

9 For implementation of the metadata() and invoke() function, copy and paste the following code into your own file: const https = require('https'); module.exports = { metadata: () => ({ name: 'sw.ifttt.lights', properties: { "mykey": { "type": "string", "required": true}, "event": { "type": "string", "required": true}, }, supportedactions: [] }), invoke: (conversation, done) => { const _event = conversation.properties().event; const _mykey = conversation.properties().mykey; var myurl = ` var data = ""; https.get(myurl, (resp) => { resp.on('data', (chunk) => { data += chunk; }); }).on("error", (err) => { console.log("error: " + err.message); }); conversation.reply('event executed: ' + _event).transition(); done(); } }

10 The resulting code should show as displayed in the image below as a screenshot: The important part to point out here is how the URL for the IFTTT Webhook gets constructed: var myurl = ` Note: For each IFTTT applet you create, you will provide an event name. Passing in the event as a parameter ( _event ), you can then use this custom components for all IFTTT applets you create in the future. Same is true for your personal key: passing the key in as a parameter ( _mykey ) gives you the opportunity to reuse it for various Webhooks, even from different developers.

11 Next, you need to edit the component service main file. Again, here the code for copy-paste: module.exports = function (service) { const OracleBot = require('@oracle/bots-node-sdk'); }; OracleBot.init(service); // implement custom component api OracleBot.Middleware.customComponent(service, { baseurl: '/mobile/custom/ifttt/components', cwd: dirname, register: [ './components' ] }); The code should look like in the image below From here on it is the standard procedure for building custom components as described in the previously mentioned TechExchange articles. Zip the directory of your implementation, upload it to Oracle Mobile Cloud as the implementation for the ifttt API, and create a backend using this API.

12 Step 4: Using the Custom Component to Invoke IFTTT Applets from Oracle Digital Assistant Now that you created the custom component and exposed it on a Mobile Backend in Oracle Mobile Cloud, you need to register it in a skill bot: Open the Oracle Digital Assistant and create or navigate to a skill bot from which you want to use the IFTTT component. Navigate to components and create a new service with the green + Service button: Give it a name, choose Oracle Mobile Cloud as the place where our custom component is running, check use anonymous access (if you set it up this way), and enter the following information: Backend ID: in Mobile Cloud, navigate to backend, settings Metadata URL: in Mobile Cloud, navigate to API, General and copy the URL from there Anonymous Key: in Mobile Cloud, navigate to backend, setting, and click show to display the anonymous key And this is it! You are are ready to invoke your first IFTTT applet from Oracle Digital Assistant. All you have to do is to invoke your custom component from the dialog flow in the skill bot. For this, you can e.g. create a dialog flow state switchlights, which when navigated to calls the custom component, which then switches the light in your home: switchlights: component: "sw.ifttt.lights" properties: event: "toggle_lights" mykey: "{your personal IFTTT key}" transitions: return: "done"

13 Note: The component name ( sw.ifttt.lights ) depends on how you named your component in the implementation of the metadata function ( lights.js ). Don t forget to set the property mykey to the key you received after setting up your IFTTT account! Following the above instructions, the image below shows a possible implementation for a skill bot calling an IFTTT applet:

14 Below is a sample conversation using the embedded conversation tester in Oracle Digital Assistant. What you don't see in the image is how it suddenly becomes dark in my appartment ;-) Do You Need Mobile Hub? Oracle Mobile Hub (Mobile Cloud) is a mobile backend service that makes sense to use for mobile use cases and for when you want to deploy custom components to a shared environment. Oracle Mobile Hub however is not a requirement for the solution explained in this article. Oracle Digital Assistant provides a local component container on the skill bot level that allows you to deploy the custom component directly to the skill bot. A great resource for learning about how to create custom components and then deploy them to the local container is the Oracle TechExchange article referenced below TechExchange - Tutorial: How-to Debug Custom Component Services Deployed to Oracle Digital Assistant Skill Bot Local Component Container Conclusion Using an IFTTT applet via custom components is a quick an easy way to connect the Oracle Digital Assistant to a variety of new services. Following the approach described in this article and passing the event name and key as

15 parameters, should make it very easy to give ODA access to new IFTTT applets as soon as they are available, as there is no need to change the implementation of the custom components! On top of that, IFTTT applets are easy to develop and constantly growing, making it possible to enhance Oracle Digital Assistant capabilities beyond classical backend functionality.