Amazon Technologies, Inc.

David Ross Bronaugh

Rohan Mutagi

Willy Lew Yuk Vong

Fred Torok

He Lu

Michael Dale Whiteley

Shikher Sitoke

Bo Li

Christopher Ryan Nies

Brian James Butler

Techniques for creating groups of devices for controlling these groups with voice commands are described herein. For instance, an environment may include an array of secondary devices (or 'smart appliances', or simply “devices”) that are configured to perform an array of operations. Users may request to create different groups of these devices, such that the users may control entire groups at a single time with individual voice commands.

Grouping devices for voice control

Techniques for remotely executing a secondary-device driver for generating commands for a secondary device are described herein. For instance, a secondary device (or 'appliance') may reside within an environment, along with a device to which the secondary device communicatively couples. The device may be configured to send control signals to the secondary device for causing the secondary device to perform certain operations. For instance, a user in the environment may provide, to the device, a request that the secondary device perform a certain operation. The device, which may lack some or all of a device driver associated with the secondary device, may then work with a remote service that executes the device driver for the purpose of receiving a command from the device driver and sending the command along to the secondary device. Upon receiving the command, the secondary device may perform the operation.

Remote execution of secondary-device drivers

Techniques for causing different devices to perform different operations using a single voice command are described herein. In some instances, a user may define a 'scene', in which a user sets different devices to different states and then associates an utterance with those states or with the operations performed by the devices to reach those states. For instance, a user may dim a light, turn on his television, and turn on his set-top box before sending a request to a local device or to a remote service to associate those settings with a predefined utterance, such as 'my movie scene'. Thereafter, the user may cause the light to dim, the television to turn on, and the set-top box to turn on simply by issuing the voice command &#x201c;execute my movie scene&#x201d;.

Creating scenes from voice-controllable devices

Techniques for creating groups of devices for controlling these groups with voice commands are described herein. For instance, an environment may include an array of secondary devices (or 'smart appliances', or simply 'devices') that are configured to perform an array of operations. Users may request to create different groups of these devices, such that the users may control entire groups at a single time with individual voice commands.

In a system in which an in-home audio device is supported by a network-based support service, certain aspects of the behavior of the audio device may be implemented as a state machine. A graphical user interface (GUI) may be provided by the support service to allow editing of a model representing the state machine of the device. Through the GUI, a user or developer can associate functions with states or state transitions of the state machine. In addition, the user or developer can associate custom code with individual states or state transitions of the state machine.

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

David Ross Bronaugh