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APIs for remotely executing Workflows


irish.cn

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I would love to see APIs to be able to remotely execute Alfred Workflows.

 

I was just thinking of all the ways I'd like to be able to control my Mac with Alexa. Most of which, if not all, I could accomplish if I could just have Alexa execute specific workflows in Alfred. I know the fear might be that exposing such APIs would lead to Alfred Remote competitors. However, I believe you could handle that with licensing or even make APIs a paid feature of Alfred. 

 

Just a thought, would love to hear other people's thoughts/input. Anyone else considered Alexa/Alfred integration?

 

Thanks,

Chris

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I think this a good suggestion that would push Alfred progressively forward in line with competitors of similar ilk.

 

Can Alexa execute commands via SSH ?  In the interim, you could possibly achieve a similar result if you were able to get Alexa to run an osascript command over SSH into your machine.

Edited by CJK
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5 hours ago, CJK said:

Can Alexa execute commands via SSH ?

 

I don't think that's realistic, as it's a fundamentally cloud-based API (as best as I can tell). It's really designed to work with other Internet-based services, not ones local to your LAN. ssh would be a terrible choice of protocol for connecting from a server to your local machine (rather than vice versa) because it's far too powerful to make it secure. You'd want to use HTTPS instead.


Either you'd need dynamic DNS set up, plus a hole in your firewall, so the Alexa/Amazon server can connect to an HTTP server on your Mac, or you'd use some client process on your Mac long-polling the Amazon server for pending messages.

 

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On 11/8/2018 at 4:48 PM, irish.cn said:

I know the fear might be that exposing such APIs would lead to Alfred Remote competitors

 

To address this point: I don't think that would be a factor. I believe Alfred Remote primarily serves to make Alfred more useful (and therefore sell more Alfred licences) rather than being a profit-centre of its own. I also don't think the Alfred team would devote their limited resources to any Alexa integration. Siri, perhaps, but not Alexa (and I've no idea how realistic that might be because I know nothing about the Siri API). Alfred has always been an extremely native app. 1Password and, more recently, Chrome are the only built--in integrations that aren't part of macOS, AFAIK (with Growl having been removed in Alfred 3). For everything else, there's the workflow API.

 

Any Alexa integration would probably have to be developed by the Alfred community, perhaps based on an existing Alexa Skills library like Flask-Ask.

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