Now Available: Use the Smart Home Live Debugger Tool to Test, Debug, and Speed Up Your Camera WebRTC Integration
Smart Home camera developers love providing real-time streaming capabilities that are secure and fast (low latency) to their customers. Smart Home Cameras’ Alexa.RTCSessionController interface enables developers to provide live streaming, 2-way communication, Automatic Live View and other experiences to their customers. Today, we are excited to introduce Smart Home Live Debugger support for Alexa.RTCSessionController integration, making it easier and faster for more camera manufacturers to test and debug their WebRTC implementation, and reducing time to market for new features. Blink, Scout Alarm and Netatmo will be among the first to use Smart Home Live Debugger to support their Alexa WebRTC integration process.
Test Your WebRTC Integration With Real-Time Debugging Tools
The Smart Home Live Debugger tool in the Alexa Developer Console can help you quickly test your WebRTC integration by surfacing events generated by the interaction of your Alexa skill with Smart Home Cameras’ signaling and streaming services. This can help address common challenge areas for WebRTC in (1) Signaling: issues with the SDP answer, incompatible DTLS version, invalid or missing ICE candidates, errors in Lambda communication, and (2) Media Streaming: Supported or unsupported codecs, state of media flow etc.
To use the Smart Home Live Debugger tool with Alexa.RTCSessionController, go to the "Test" page in the Alexa Developer Console, then at the top of the page select "Device Log" and enable the Smart Home Live Debugger toggle to create a new session.
To generate events, you will need to first set up a client, such as an Echo device with a screen, and link your skill with Alexa. Then, when you use an utterance, such as “Alexa, show me the front door camera”, you will immediately see events published in the device logs section for each step, starting from the utterance to when you start seeing the live view on the Echo device. You can then dive deeper into these events, such as viewing detailed JSON objects to check responses and troubleshoot issues or exceptions, with all critical and sensitive information, such as customer IDs, filtered out. The JSON objects will contain appropriate error codes and messages to help you narrow down issues and potentially confine them to a focused area for further troubleshooting, so it does not feel like you are integrating and testing against a black box.
Reduce Time to Market from Months to a Few weeks
Whether you are an established brand or a start up, you can use the Smart Home Live Debugger to reduce the time to launch an Alexa Smart Home skill and get your product Works with Alexa (WWA) certified. With this self-service tool, you can independently debug issues from anywhere in the world.
Netatmo, who recently released their first WebRTC compatible Smart Video Doorbell, is excited to use the tool to assist their integration efforts, “Debugging a WebRTC integration could previously be challenging without being able to know where things were going wrong. We are looking forward to using the new Smart Home Live Debugger tool to help us accelerate our Smart Video Doorbell integration with Alexa.” said Christophe Puga, lead software engineer from Netatmo.
Get Started
Learn more about how you can use the Smart Home Live Debugger tool for your WebRTC integration by viewing the documentation below.