Question: does will the recent IFTTT changes affect this project in any way?
Wizek opened this issue · 3 comments
I've heard that some changes are coming to IFTTT. I wonder if/how AssistantComputerControl will be affected.
I don't use IFTTT with a lot of things, mostly ACC if I think about it, so AFAIU me and and other people who are similar won't have to sign up for pro as some applets can be kept active on the free tier.
But I wonder, would it be possible in any way to work around the IFTTT requirement for ACC?
Well, the way ACC is designed, is to be used with IFTTT. In reality, the software can work with pretty much anything you want - anything that can make a file appear on your computer can trigger an ACC command :)
But , IFTTT is the easiest way I've found to combine ACC with the most possible services.
The change in IFTTT will not affect most ACC users, as the only limit it brings to non-paying-users, is only having 3 applets that you created yourself. This means you can still enable all the many hundreds of ACC applets made by me, or by other users as well. ACC is paying for IFTTT, so I can create as many applets as I want.
Many use the open action, and for those who use it a lot, this change will be frustrating, as this action requires you to create one applet per. software you want to open.
There is a way to get around this though, which is "simply" for me to add a lot more pre-made applets for the open action, and other actions like it that people would have more of.
The development of the project will be unaffected by this, although my busy life means I don't have much time for this project, although I'd like to. A bigger update is planned, and actually pretty much done, introducing "action mods" where you can create your own actions. These action mods would be coded by the community, using Python, Batch or PowerShell (or really anything that can run and return some text saying "ok").
If you find an alternative for IFTTT, do tell. Again, the only requirement is that the service can create a file in a cloud service folder :)
That's a relief to hear. I did notice this on the applet cards:
[ACC] Sleep computer (Dropbox)
by assistantcomputercontrol [Pro]
Connected
And thought [Pro] ment requiring subscription to enable, but apparently it likely means that the assistantcomputercontrol account has pro for itself.
Therefore it seems we are not in any hurry, and likely continuing to use IFTTT is still the best, however convoluted it may seem. :)
Just throwing a dart in the dark, but I wonder if it could be possible to set up an AWS Lambda instance that gets triggered from Google Assistant which could issue a dropbox REST API call to create the required file.
@Wizek that's possible for sure. And quite easy to set up even (with the programming knowledge, of course).
The reason IFTTT as a middle-man is a good solution for this project, is that it's free (well, at least for most users...), and doesn't require all the traffic to go through my server, making this a very costly free open source project ;P
There are a lot of better ways to do it, but they include essentially creating the "If I say X to my Google assistant, it creates a file in my Dropbox", meaning link to the Google account as well as Dropbox, and using both of their API's. So it's not a field I am going to explore, but I know some users want to, and might already have. It's always nice when people find a new way to use this software :)