Help me with a Smart Home Interview – US Participants Needed

[LibraSun]

Has anyone successfully incorporated incoming call(er) information** within an automation workflow?

I'm talking about having Alexa speak out the name and/or phone number of a caller, or activating a routine/scene based on that info.

Always been a dream of mine. Wouldn't know how to achieve it! Do they make an Ethernet/WiFi-connected CallerID box?

**from a LANDLINE, not a MOBILE PHONE (although in the case of my Google Voice #, both lines ring, and if my smartphone is home and turned on, I could see invoking Tasker somehow)

REFERENCES:

NCID - Network Caller ID

[Please file under proper category, as you see fit]

[LibraSun]

As a proof of concept, I rustled up the following workflow, and it works fantastically!

ON VERA:
Created a virtual sensor (dev #365) of type "Generic" using the Virtual Sensor plug-in by @toggledbits

ON SMARTPHONE:
Created new Tasker Profile that activates when Phone is Ringing > Runs task: HTTP Request (GET) > payload =

http://<my_vera_ip>:3480/data_request?id=variableset&DeviceNum=365&serviceId=urn:toggledbits-com:serviceId:VirtualSensor1:SetValue&Variable=newValue&Value=%CNUM

where the built-in Tasker variable %CNUM automatically substitutes the caller's 11-digit phone number.

Works a charm! Now, I can have MSR simply monitor the 'New Value' variable on the VS and react accordingly.

[therealdb]

I have something similar to get the status of my home office PC when in a VOIP call. It will trigger a virtual switch that's driving a BusyLight oustide my office, sending a notification to my TVs and running a couple of scenes based on the time, to turn on a couple of lights automatically when I'm in a videocall.

[LibraSun]

For funsies, I took things a step further using Pushover (recommended by the creator of MSR). After setting up a Desktop notification endpoint in Pushover, I simply instruct MSR to send a push notification to my browser whenever a phone call comes in.

The process starts, as mentioned above, in Tasker. I modified the value= component of the GET URL so that it sends more than just the phone number; now, it passes %CNAME, %CNUM, 'Libra cell' as a comma-separated list of three items: the caller's name, number and the name I assign to my mobile device.

In my Caller ID Log rule in MSR, that information (as explained above) gets routed through a virtual sensor on Vera, then pulled into an Expression with:

callerNum  :=  getEntity( "vera>device_365" ).attributes.x_vera_svc_toggledbits_com_VirtualSensor1_SetValue.newValue

and turned into a 5-element array using:

callerArr  :=  split( "IN," + timeStamp + "," + trim(callerNum), "," )
// yields [ "IN", <call_time>, <caller_name>, <caller_number>, <device_label> ]
// NOTE: timeStamp is a Global Expression that I defined separately in MSR

from which MSR can easily pluck the pieces needed to compose a Pushover notification.

[LibraSun]

For anyone into formatting phone numbers using MSR's built-in Regex engine, here's one possible Expression to try. It takes an 11-digit U.S. phone number string, extracts the digits using capture groups, and formats them with dashes, all in one go:

phNum  :=  
a="+12345678901",
b=substr(replace(a,"(\\d{1})(\\d{3})(\\d{3})(\\d{4})","$2-$3-$4"),-12,12),
b

// yields (string) "234-567-8901"

[parkerc]

Slight tangent, but I’ve been using sipgate voip service ( https://www.sipgate.co.uk/ ) for years, and I’ve never really explored its API..

There seems to be a wealth of capabilities in there.. - https://api.sipgate.com/v2/doc

If it’s of interest to you or any others, my initial attempt to authenticate / use it is below..

#!/usr/bin/lua

print("start of whole code")

local https = require "ssl.https"
local mime = require "mime"
local json = require "dkjson"
--local http = require "socket.http"
local data = ""
local username = "sipname"
local password = "sippass"

local function collect(chunk)
  if chunk ~= nil then
    data = data .. chunk
    end
  return true
end

local ok, statusCode, headers, statusText = https.request {
  method = "GET",
  url = "https://api.sipgate.com/v2/history",
  headers = {
    ["Accept"] = "application/json",
    ["Authorization"] = "Basic " .. (mime.b64(username ..":" .. password)),
    },
  sink = collect
}

print("data = ", data)
local sip = json.decode(data)
print("---------")
for k, v in pairs(sip) do
	print(k, "\t", v)
  end
print("---------")
for n, a in pairs(sip.items) do
	print(n, "\t", a)
end
print("---------")
for p, k in pairs(sip.items) do
	--print(n, "\t", a)
print("---------")
for d, e in pairs(sip.items[p]) do
		print(d, "\t", e)
end
end
print("---------")

[LibraSun]

So many of the Callback / VOIP / SIP / SMS / etc. services also provide code templates to use against their API, which is awesome. But you bring up an interesting point, @parkerc ... I've never seen "Lua" among the languages they offer, lol!

Nice to see you rolling your own. And if it works, perhaps send the company a copy for them to add to their library?

[parkerc]

@librasun said in Caller ID in HA workflow:

. But you bring up an interesting point, @parkerc ... I've never seen "Lua" among the languages they offer, lol!

Exactly !, I noticed that too, no one seems to promote Lua

@librasun said in Caller ID in HA workflow:

Nice to see you rolling your own. And if it works, perhaps send the company a copy for them to add to their library?

It took me a while to just get that working, I don’t think those types of companies will want to use my pieced together bits of code