I'm in the process of switching over our vacation home from Wink to HE. Moving the devices over was a breeze. I've added the Alexa Skill to HE and have selected all of my devices and the Alexa app sees all of them. I have Alexa groups for each of my four Echo Dots (Master BR, Kitchen, Living Room, and Dining Room) and have added all of the discovered devices to the appropriate group. So far, so good.
Regardless of which room I'm in, saying "Alexa; lights on" always results in the following message "A few things share the name lights. Which one did you want?"
For example: My "Kitchen" group contains three z-wave dimmers named:
Kitchen Counter Lights
Kitchen Recessed Lights
Kitchen Table Light
All are set as Lights in the Alexa app. I would expect that the "Alexa; Lights on" command would turn all of the them on. At least that's the way it worked with the Wink Alexa integration.
So, I just tried "Alexa, turn the lights on" and that works as expected. Then I tried "Alexa; lights off" and "Alexa; lights on" and now both of those also work. I didn't do anything different and now it works in all rooms.
Try setting up a Hubitat group " Kitchen Lights" and use a different descriptor eg "lamp" or "overhead" for each of the individual fixtures. Then just put the Hubitat Group into the Amazon room/group associated with the appropriate Echo device. If you want to still control the individual devices then ask Alexa "turn on the kitchen counter lamps/cabinets/etc".
Now works perfectly for me - hope you have success too.
I'd only come across it as I was re-enabling a room in Groups.
They turned on, but then got the same message as you when trying to turn off. I was like WTF?
They did eventually turn off, then I saw on FB others reporting the same issue,
Irregularities are, well oddly enough regular. I've had sucess with names that I wanted to use, but didn't always work as expected by adding them to Alexa groups of the same name.
To do this, you have to delete the device from Alexa. Create the group with the name of the device you just deleted, and then discover the device again. Then you can add it to the Alexa group with the device sharing the same name. It's odd, but has worked well for me with several devices. I also add groups that sound similar, but I have no other device. For example, it sometimes mistakes my saying "Deck Light" for "Desk Light". I have not automated desk light and never will. So I have another Alexa Group called "Desk Light" and it contains my deck light.
Yeah, it's really odd. You ask the same thing in a different way, and it works just fine. I've found the best results from speaking to it like I would another human. I would not say to my wife, "light on". I would say "turn the light on". I of course would add please when speaking to a human.
Agree, but I never ask my car please. Never say please to Siri. These are objects. I always try to remember to say please and thank you to people though.
Thank you for your comments. Please accept my polite dissension on the subject.
An Alexa outage appears to have been my problem. Alexa commands for light groups were solid for weeks. Suddenly this morning any Echo in the house I used would state 'A few things share...Which one did you want?' After a couple of hours things are stable again.
What's more interesting is I've been having the issue where Alexa would trigger my light group on/off command correctly but then state it's not responding.
That also appears to have self-corrected (for now).
Greetings to all
I have same issue, I created the group in Alexa but when I asked to turn on/off the table lamp in the group, Alexa is asking same question, “ A few things share the name...”. Because l have another table lamp with different name containing table lamp words in the different group. It seems to me my group is not working. Any advice?
