Override or Overwrite Alexa's Time Skill

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So I have this thing on my mind (for quite a while now). When I ask Alexa "Alexa, What is the time?" or "Alexa, what's the time?", it only tells the time in 12 hour format (like "The time is 2:15 PM" etc), which I find absolutely irritating and annoying. For the 24 hour format, I have to say "Alexa, What is the military time?" or something like that. This is the the way I want Alexa to tell the time always.

A few years ago, I think around 2018, I had requested for the feature, on Alexa's dev forums or feedback section, and rummaging through the discussions/forums, it was a very widely requested feature. But till date, I don't think there has been anything on it.

So for the past few months, I thought of doing it on my own. I have never built a skill as such. Just done some demos and tutorials here and there.

So my question is, is it possible to get the inbuilt Alexa skill for telling the time and update it according to my needs? If I can get my hands on the JSON file for the time skill, probably I can hack something with it and in the process learn a little about developing Alexa skills.

I tried building some a skill with the intent "what is the time", but that seems to be conflicting with the inbuilt skill.

1 Answers

This isn't a perfect solution, but try creating a routine through your Alexa app where the trigger is an utterance ("what is the time") and the action is launching your custom skill. Create your custom skill to simply say the time however you want when it is launched. Routines should override the top-level time functionality, but the trigger is not robust. You will have to say the utterance exactly as you've defined it. You could also create multiple routines with the same action, just different utterances to be more flexible, but that could be hard to manage.

Either hardcode your timezone in your skill if it's just for you in one location, or use the Alexa Settings API to fetch any user's time zone.

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