Alternate voice title field or data (for Alexa etc)

I use the Alex plex feature quite a bit. Mostly it works pretty well, but you need to be very specific when stating the title of the item you want to play. If the title is simple, or logical, then it works well. but if the title is weird, has numbers mixed in, has odd spelling etc it just won’t be found. If we had a field that could specify a voice assistant title or perhaps phonetic title (doesn’t matter what it get called really), then queries that come from voice assistants could be matched with this first. This would allow you to have an alternate understandable title when you have to say it out loud.

For instance: I have all the Harry potter films and some sound tracks. I currently have to ask “Alexa, ask Plex to play the album Harry Potter and the half blood prince music form the motion picture” to get it to play reliably. Otherwise it sometimes tries to play the film or just gets confused, I can’t just ask “Alexa, ask Plex to play half blood prince soundtrack”.

Another example is the artist “Socalled” - that never works as it searches for “so called”.

If not actual separate fields (which would mean ui changes), then possibly modified tags in the current fields. Much like filenames have for getting scraped. You could specify the artist as Socalled {so called}, for instance. At least that way you could put a voice hint in any field.

thanks!

Agreed. The band Katseye shows the following and other similar items in the logs:

/hubs/search?query=cat%27s%20eye&limit=25

/hubs/search?query=cat%27seye&limit=25

Can the tags per artists be searched or indexed to be used in the query results?

I did find a hack. Create a playlist named “Artist Cats Eye” with the phonetic spelling of your difficult words (console logs are your friend). The extra word “Artist” in the playlist name aids in sorting and organizing different scoped playlists (think Genre or other classification). Then, when I say, “Alexa, tell Plex to play playlist Artist Katseye”, it works.

I like that work-around. It’s a shame though. We have all this meta data and it would seem very trivial to add this feature, but we’ll have to bodge it for now.

Good idea though.