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Music Assistant has the ability to be controlled by voice through Yandex Alice by registering a custom skill in Yandex Dialogs. Users speak free-form phrases like “Alice, ask <skill name> to play jazz” and Music Assistant resolves the player and the requested media server-side.

CAUTION

This is an unofficial integration and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Yandex.

WARNING

Music Assistant must be reachable on a public HTTPS URL — Yandex sends voice phrases directly to your MA server. There is no cloud relay for Dialogs custom skills.

  • Free-form voice playback: search and play artists, albums, tracks, playlists and genres
  • Transport and queue control: pause / resume / next / previous / seek, shuffle, repeat, add to queue, what’s playing
  • Multi-room: address a specific player by name, transfer the queue to another player, list players
  • Voice-first disambiguation when a player name is ambiguous (the skill asks “first, second, or third?”)
  • Morphologically aware natural language understanding with fuzzy player-name matching
  • One-click skill registration in the config form via Yandex Passport sign-in (no manual setup in the Yandex Dialogs developer console required)

The plugin is added by navigating to MA Settings then selecting Plugins and clicking on ADD A PLUGIN.

The settings form walks through three steps: sign in to Yandex with the Passport device-code flow, create the skill in Yandex Dialogs (one click — the plugin handles registration and deployment), and select the players you want voice control to reach. After Yandex moderation completes (typically 5-15 minutes) the skill is on the air.

Full step-by-step setup, troubleshooting and FAQ: trudenboy.github.io/ma-provider-yandex-alice.

  • Yandex Dialogs custom skills require a publicly reachable HTTPS endpoint for the MA webserver. Reverse proxy, port forwarding or similar is needed; a private LAN address will not work.
  • After the skill is created, Yandex moderation takes 5-15 minutes before voice commands actually reach Alice. The plugin shows live moderation status in the settings form.
  • Player aliases set in the Home with Alice app are not forwarded to the skill — players are addressed by their Music Assistant name. Rename the player in MA if you want a different voice name.
  • The skill is registered against your Yandex account; only one Yandex account per MA instance.