I struggle with naming things in a manner that functions for humans. as a hacker/programmer I have no trouble naming devices, groups, rooms etc... but when it comes to integration into the voice side, I (not really me, my GF) get frustrated with ID'ing a device or group and repeat ourselves as we argue with Alexa about a device existence.
Case in point:
I have two bathrooms. in HE I call the rooms Main Bathroom and Master Bathroom. Within that, I have a group of 4 light bulbs around the mirror called 'Main Bathroom Lights'. I have an outlet for the ceiling fan. This outlet is in it's own group called 'Main Bathroom Fan'.
I have a group called Main Bathroom which consists of the 2 previous groups, the lights and the fan.
If, at say 5am, I walk into the bathroom I get blinded by lights going on and say 'Alexa, turn off the bathroom lights'.
We get into a frustrating talk about there being more than one thing named Bathroom...' - after 3-4 back and forth's, I get the urge to drop the Echo Dot into the toilet... the GF shouts 'Alexa, turn the Master Bathroom Lights to 10% for f**ks sake'. (she's a morning person)
All joking aside, I've stumbled on ways in the past to overcome some of the weird dynamics with Alexa naming - Changing Bathroom to Bath Room for example, has impact. How are others handling this? Specific Alexa's having specific commands? Less Alexa enabled devices from HE?
Better rules to handle exceptions previously not thought about? Please take some time and write a useful explanation of your implementation!
You know you can create routines in Alexa and then.say whatever you want and have it do.its thing. I use routines for things where the naming of.the devices doesny fit.
I pull my devices over with their (engineering) HE names.
This does not work for the wife, and causes the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) to reduce.
My house has 5 bedrooms and 5 baths...so I get your point.
What I have done is create separate Alexa groups and put the devices into those groups. For example:
Master bedroom is just "bedroom". My wife can say "Alexa bedroom off" and it will turn off the stuff in the master bedroom without Alexa getting confused.
Master bathroom is just "bathroom". My wife can say "Alexa bathroom off" and it will turn off the stuff in the master bathroom.
Other groups/phrases were negotiated for her "ease of use".
I use three different methods depending on the situation...
(1) I create an Alexa group that may have a different name than the group in HE, then I turn things on and off by Alexa group name instead
(2) I do step 1 but I make sure there is an echo device in the physical room and in the alexa group. If you're in the master bathroom, and the lights are in the group master bathroom, and there is an echo in that group, you can say "Alexa, dim lights 50%" and she will figure out to dim the lights in the same Alexa group.
(3) I create routines with easy-to-use Alexa commands. So "Alexa turn on the f*ing lights" actually turns on the master bathrooom lights and has Alexa issue an apology.
I leave off the word “lights” wherever possible. Alexa already knows what devices are lights and I’ve had nothing but trouble when having this in the name.
If you have your “rooms” set up in Alexa, you can just say “shut off the lights”.
Okay - Kudos to the community this morning! Huge. simply Huge. I don't play much with the Echo's - I just use them for music and for voice commands when rules don't cover something.
The Alexa in a group allows for an override sort of thing - THAT is clearly necessary to take advantage of and to solve this! In my defense, when I used Alexa groups they conflicted and confused things 2 years ago so I opted for just HE groups and I never looked back.
One issue I ran into last year when my mom visited. She likes to get up at 4. So she went down to the sunroom and told the Alexa in the room "turn on the lights." I neglected to include the sun room echo in the Alexa sun room group, so rather than Alexa turning on the lights in the sun room, she turned on ALL the lights. At 4am. So make sure all your echos are assigned to a group in the Alexa app... even if you need to create a dymmy group for unassigned echos.
It has been my experience that Alexa routine triggers are evaluated after she tries to make sense of what you are asking. If I create a routine to open the garage door by saying those words, I often get the response "Garage back door doesn't support that" (garage back door is a contact device known to her).
If I try to get cute and say "Open the pod bay door please Hal", she responds with her "I can't do that, Dave. I'm not Hal and we're not in space" even though those specific words are a routine trigger.
And as always, Alexa's algorithm for processing what was said has peculiar randomness to it.
The only way to achieve success is to use words to trigger a routine that can't possibly be mistaken for anything else. To open my garage door, I use something along the lines of "Mambo jump feel in banana patch" and she opens it right up.
thats why you dont name it the same..
ie name iit garage door switch or garage door opener
and for the route specifiy alexa open the garage door.
i use this for my dog gate with is obvioius a switch/relay
it is named dog gate switch
and the command is alexa open/close (i have two routeines) the dog gate.
The conflicting devices aren't named the same, as I stated. But Alexa tries to find "garage door" and settles on "garage back door", and all that occurs before considering routine triggers.
I'm not surprised that you get different results in a similar situation. That's the element of randomness I was talking about.
i didn't read the other comments, but i would suggest creating groups in Alexa. you can then just say "Alexa, turn off the lights", and it'll turn off the lights within that group. if you have your master bathroom alexa in the group with the master bathroom lights, it'll turn them off without having to specify "master bathroom lights"
Thanks all. As a summation of what I've learned today -
Trying to do everything via Hubitat simply identifies the weaknesses of Hubitat as it pertains to voice control. I learned that HE is super good at automation, but the definitions and integration to other 'services' such as Alexa don't work well. Rooms, for example, do not cross connect into Alexa.
Using Alexa to do Alexa related tasks is the solution in this case. I did not know that Alexa was 'room smart'. Putting an echo device into a room, really opens up a great world of voice control options I just couldn't easily obtain with HE. Conversely, Alexa routines are rudimentary and in many cases too difficult to implement specifically when it comes to automation. Turning the lights on at sunset may be relatively easy, but turning the lights on at sunset on only odd days of the week in a leapyear is not possible.
So lesson learned. Use the right tool for the job. Voice commands? Use Alexa programming. Automation? use Hubitat.
Why not reconfigure your motion lighting automations so that the lights don’t come on to 100% when you get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom?
We only have a Fire tablet which primarily functions as a dashboard. I rather enjoy when my wife asks me, "why doesn't she (Alexa) just know what I meant?". It is a challenge to go back to what was my wife really looking to accomplish and how would she likely articulate that. Come to think of it, this is a form of marriage counseling.
My first real automation was "Alexa, the dog farted." Not classy, but my wife would normally grab her nose and announce it anyway, expecting me to turn on the ceiling fan. That is not a time when you want to guess whether it was called "fan", "ceiling fan", "living room ceiling fan", "family room fan", etc.
That's so funny... I too had issues trying to come up with names (custom phrases) for Alexa to open my garage door. The one that finally worked for me after desperation was "Open the F%^&*-ing garage door"... that one worked without issues. I live in a very rural area so I'm not so concerned someone is going to yell at a window but just to be sure, I wrote the script that tells HE not to open the garage door remotely if my presence sensor is "departed".
Update - having recently implemented the 'group' functions on my alexa has been Very useful... but it also can have a negative consequence...
I have an app for controlling the bathroom fan as it monitors room humidity. Having grouped (the alexa term) the fan into the bathroom group on Alexa is overriding the HE app. While the behavior is obvious and explainable it seems that in certain cases its an either/or situation. The fan in this case has to be removed from the Alexa group. Keep that in mind...
Can you give more context? Alexa Groups and HE Apps are mutually exclusive, so unless there is something being triggered by one side making the other do something unexpected, I dont quite get this --but also virtual switches could help 'dont do this when X is on because Alexa is in the shower' or whatever
