Does IFTTT's Alexa channel support 'text ingredients'?

Question

IFTTT has support for Amazon Echo (and the Alexa assistant) through the Amazon Alexa channel. Some channels allow you to specify variables, known as ingredients, from a trigger which will be passed into the output event.

The Google Assistant channel supports recognising a phrase with a text ingredient (see the "Google Assistant triggers and actions" at the bottom of the page):

Say a phrase with a text ingredient

This trigger fires when you say “Ok Google” to the Google Assistant followed by a phrase like “Post a tweet saying ‘New high score.’” **Use the $ symbol to specify where you'll say the text ingredient

Alexa's trigger does not seem to mention anything about text ingredients:

Say a specific phrase

This trigger fires every time you say "Alexa trigger" + the phrase that you have defined. For instance, if you set "party time" as the phrase, you can say "Alexa trigger party time" to have your lights loop colors. Please use lower-case only. Neither German characters (Umlaute/Eszet) nor their long-form equivalents (ae, oe, etc.) are currently supported — support is coming soon.

Does the Alexa channel support ingredients at all, or must I preprogram every possible input I want?

Answer 1

No, it doesn't at the moment. The only this block that supports custom entries is the trigger block you cited yourself already. That function block does not support any special characters to be entered that would be necessary to define IFTTT variables.

So yes, you do have to create a recipe manually for every phrase Alexa is supposed to react to via IFTTT. Hopefully they will add a more flexible this block as well. We can see on the Google channel that they have basically four different this blocks, "simple phrase", "with number", "with text" and "with both". The Alexa channel only supports simple phrases up until now. Hopefully they catch up.