Alexa, find me an alternative to IFTTT

On 31st October 2023, the built-in Alexa integration with IFTTT stopped working with very little notice given to its users. This post show how you can replace IFTTT and get your Alexa Routines back up and working!

I don’t have a lot of time invested in a complex IFTTT setup, but we do use it to tell the kids that dinner is ready using this flow;

  1. An Alexa Routine listens for, “Alexa, tell the kids dinner is ready”
  2. The Routine calls an IFTTT Recipe
  3. The IFTTT Recipe writes 2 text files to Dropbox containing commands to execute on the PC
  4. The kids’ PCs, which use the same Dropbox account, have AssistantComputerControl monitoring the text files
  5. As soon as AssistantComputerControl detects the text files it executes the command inside & deletes the file. In my case, it plays a sound telling the kids dinner is ready.

We can remove the Alexa Routine call to IFTTT by replacing it with a service called Voice Monkey. Voice Monkey has a lot more features, like being able to call a web service & have Alexa read out a response. I couldn’t do that with IFTTT!

If you still want to call a IFTTT Recipe, you can change the Recipe to be triggered by a HTTP request, then call that from your Voice Monkey Flow.

In my case, I wanted to remove IFTTT entirely from my workflow, so instead of having that write the text files to Dropbox, I did the same thing using an Azure Logic App, which I’ve blogged about before and have a video showing them in action here;

My new workflow is as follows;

  1. An Alexa Routine listens for, “Alexa, tell the kids dinner is ready”
  2. The Routine calls a Voice Monkey Flow
  3. The Flow makes a HTTP call to a Logic App, then responds with a custom message for Alexa to read out.
  4. The Logic App writes 2 text files to Dropbox containing commands to execute on the PC
  5. Our 2 kids’ PCs, which use the same Dropbox account, have AssistantComputerControl monitoring the text files
  6. As soon as AssistantComputerControl detects the text files it executes the command inside & deletes the file. In my case, it plays a sound telling the kids dinner is ready.

If you don’t need anything as fancy as Voice Money, you could try URL Switch, which is easier to set up, and lets you call any webservice/HTTP address. I gave that a go & it worked fine, but the options in Voice Monkey give a lot more flexibility & things to play with!

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