frekel / alexa-apple-calendar

Use your Amazon Echo (Alexa) to read upcoming events from Apple Calendar.

alexa-apple-calendar

An example Alexa Skill to read upcoming events from Apple Calendar, written in Python.

Dependencies

• An AWS account
• A pre-existing Apple ID with events in the calendar.

Quick Start

1. Open lambda_function.py, fill in your Apple ID username and password at the top and save. If you use 2 factor authentication then you will need to turn it off, as the Apple web service doesn't seem to work with app specific passwords.
2. Zip up the four folders (dateutil, pytz, requests & tzlocal) and the three .py files (apple_calendar_api.py, isoweek.py and lambda_function.py) into a single zip file.
3. Create an AWS Lambda function using your zip file as the code
   • You can follow the official Amazon instructions to give you a hand
   • You should uncomment the block in the lambda_handler function and insert your applicationId to only allow requests coming from your applicationId
   • You can use test_event.json as your test template.
   • Consider extending the timeout beyond the default of 3 seconds (I raised mine to 10, which is likely excessive, but may eliminate some sporadic errors)
4. Create a new Alexa Skill using intent_schema.json and sample_utterances.txt. You can choose your own word for invocation (I use calendar).
5. Don't publish the skill (because it includes your Apple ID username and password), leave it in development mode
6. Test that it's working from the web interface during the creation of the skill
7. Test that it's working with your Echo

Examples

So far the following commands work:

1. Alexa ask calendar today - lists events happening today
2. Alexa ask calendar tomorrow - lists events happening tomorrow
3. Alexa ask calendar Monday (or any other day) - lists events happening on the next day given
4. Alexa ask calendar this week - lists events between today and next Sunday
5. Alexa ask calendar next week - lists a full week of events starting from next Monday

Note that if you used something other than calendar for the invocation word, you must substitute that in the above examples.

Known Issues

1. Currently you can't add new events as the Apple web service doesn't allow this.
2. Doesn't work if you use 2 Factor Authentication to protect your Apple account.
3. As a consequence of the point above, I receive an email from Apple every single time it runs telling me I have logged into a new computer so I've set my email host to delete all these.

Acknowledgements

• https://github.com/n8henrie/alexa-wolfram-alpha -- A simple skill to query Wolfram Alpha, from which I have cribbed the instructions in this README and some of the boilerplate code.
• https://github.com/picklepete/pyicloud -- A Python library for connecting to iCloud, which I stripped down to the basics for our purposes here.