Alexa error when turning URL Switches on or off

Modified on Sun, 3 Mar at 1:41 PM

Overview

In some cases, when using an URL Switch, Alexa will report that the switch is unresponsive or that it could not be turned on or off.

When handling smart home devices with Alexa skills, Alexa expects the skill to return valid responses for every command. If you turn on a regular light bulb (“Alexa, turn on my light bulb”), for instance, Alexa will expect the light bulb to report back if it was switched on successfully. The response times should be as short as possible.
The URL Switch skills works exactly the same way. When you turn on a URL Switch, the Alexa skill will call the URL you provided. Now, Alexa will wait for the URL Switch to report back if the switch was turned on successfully.

The URL Switch Alexa skill calls the URL you provided and looks at the HTTP response. If a response code of 200 (“HTTP Success”) is returned, the URL Switch will tell Alexa that your switch was turned on successfully. For any other HTTP responses (403, 404, 500 etc.), the URL Switch will tell Alexa that the switch was not turned on successfully.

If your URL could be called successfully (HTTP response code 200), but if your website is slow to respond, the response might take too long and Alexa might assume that the switch could not be turned on.

Step-by-step guide

If your URL Switch is reported being unresponsive, our advice is:

Please check the HTTP response code when calling the URL you provided for your URL Switch. You can check it in the inspector or developer tools of your favourite browser. It should be 200 (HTTP Success).
Please check how long it takes until the URL you provided generates the response.
In general, please check if everything works as expected when you call the URL in a browser (and not from your Alexa environment).

The important thing is that even if Alexa reports an error, the URL you provided has been called nonetheless! So the website might have been called successfully but might have responded slowly.

If the steps above do not solve the issues you encounter, there is another easy option:

Open https://www.virtualsmarthome.xyz/url_switch/ and log in using your Amazon account.
Locate the URL Switch that is slow to respond.
Activate the option “Always report success when turning switch on or off” and save the changed.

This will make sure that the URL Switch reports back to Alexa that it was turned on or off successfully even if the web server hosting the URL you provided was slow to respond.