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Building an Alexa Skill to Control my TV
A couple of months back I came across a tweet from @freezydorito. She had found an unsecured API on her TV and was trying to build an Alexa Skill to utilize the API and control the TV by voice.
I’m a huge fan of devices controlled by voice — our house has multiple Amazon Echos and is fitted out with Philips Hue lighting in every room, using voice has become second nature. The TVs in my house are Sony Bravias, but they are slightly older and don’t have native Alexa support built-in, so I wanted to see if my TVs still had APIs — to my delight, they did!
My end goal was to be able to control the power, inputs, channels, volume and playback on my TVs. Looking over the API reference from Sony, it appeared this was all possible.
If you’d like to play along at home or get something running with minimal effort, I’ve published all my code to GitHub.
