0
Under review

The Alexa Hebcal skill hasn't worked for months.

izzy 2 days ago updated by Michael J. Radwin yesterday at 12:27 a.m. 1

When I try to use Hebcal on Alexa, it says "I'm having trouble accessing your Hebcal skill right now"

This has been going on for months.

I have 

Rebooted
Disabled and re-enabled
REbooted 
davened

Nothing changes.

Under review

Hi Izzy,


Thanks so much for your patience, and sorry for the frustration this has caused — especially since we know you’ve genuinely tried everything on your end (the davening included, which we appreciate!).


Since Amazon released Alexa+, the older Alexa skills infrastructure that Hebcal relied on has largely stopped functioning correctly, and unfortunately this is outside of our control. We’ve spent considerable time trying to debug and fix the integration, but at this point we don’t believe it’s fixable on our end.


We’re sorry to say the Hebcal Alexa skill may need to be retired. We know this is disappointing news, especially for something you relied on regularly.


In the meantime, you can still get Hebcal info via:

  • The Hebcal website/app directly
  • Google Calendar or other calendar sync with Hebcal’s Jewish holiday feeds
  • The Hebcal API, if you or someone you know wants to build a workaround

We’ll update this thread if anything changes with Amazon’s platform that makes the skill viable again. Thanks again for your patience and for flagging this.