In the interim, I signed up with amazon US and also managed to get out of todays outage. Totally worth it.
I have paid music subscription so somewhat tied to uk account.
Had to endure this morning outage - did wonder what was going on, Surely they could provide a better message than 'I am having trouble understanding right now' and redirect to a service to provide current status?
Sorry to hear, not nice. I knew nothing about that until I checked FB. At least you wouldn't have to transfer all Alexa Devices, just the one you want to execute the commands from. Not helpful maybe, but maybe there's a way you can work it? Yeah, I've lost my Prime so I took Spottily up on their offer of a free month, although I may stick with it.
Agree on the error, they must be able to work in some response code or something to help end users,.
The new Alexa app/skill doesn't hide anything either unless you uncheck that device, which it does provide a way to do for Hue lights by default (under the assumption that they are paired to a Hue bridge that not only integrates directly with Alexa itself but also provides greater functionality, like setting color by voice, which Hubitat currently does not).
If you want the Hue devices, don't check the box to disable their checking. 
(Or go and manually select them all.) I definitely like not having all Hubitat devices passed to Alexa by default like the old app did--there are many I don't want because they "sound" similar to other devices and confuse Alexa, to say nothing of the fact that emulating a Hue bridge caused overly-curious other apps like Home Assistant and even ST to discover my Hubitat hub as a Hue bridge and offer to (or just do...) add my "lights."
EDIT: Wait. It ignores Hue devices even if you tell it not to?
As @cstory777 pointed out when the skill was originally released, the new Alexa Skill does (or did) specifically hide Hue devices. They're still shown in the device list in Habitat, and you can check or uncheck them, but they're silently ignored when presenting the device list to Alexa. As the skill says,
If you include a device that isn't compatible with Alexa it will just be ignored and not sent to Alexa.
As far as I can tell, having once again checked some Hue devices and asked Alexa to discover devices, this still seems to be the case.
I agree it's nice to be able to pick and choose devices to send to Alexa, but I wish the skill would actually present all the devices I select to Alexa, and not silently discard some of them. I would prefer to have Alexa control my Hues through Hubitat rather than by talking directly to the Hue bridge because it improves the responsiveness of Hubitat rules that listen to Hue light states.
I didn't realize it silently ignored Hue lights even if you specifically chose them. I got the impression from a previous conversation that this was not intended behavior. Have you confirmed that it's not a bug with Hubitat?
For the responsiveness, that's a good reason. I don't know what ST did, but it seems to respond to changes in Hue lights much faster than Hubitat, which as far as I can see seems to just check in once a minute. I have some custom lighting apps based on motion that dim when motion stops after saving light states and restores them if motion resumes before the lights turn off (after a timer), and unlike ST I notice that sometimes Hubitat doesn't save the correct light states if I have a relatively short period before dimming. (I can work around this by increasing that timeout, but if you have something on Hubitat that subscribes to a Hue light changing and it needs to be fast, that's obviously even more different.)
Yes, it's intentional. I think the logic was that users probably already had Alexa hooked up to Hue directly, so if Hubitat passed through Hue devices you'd end up with a bunch of duplicates. I still would have preferred the option, though. Just before they came out with the new skill, I had disassociated my Alexa from Hue and was only using Hue devices from Hubitat. When the new skill came out, suddenly Alexa couldn't talk to my Hues anymore (because Hubitat was no longer making them available).
I believe ST does what the Hue iOS app does, and just polls the hub very frequently (the Hue app polls once every 2 seconds). You can get the same effect on Hubitat by setting up a RM rule that polls any Hue light every few seconds. (Polling any single light will update the state of all your Hues in Hubitat.)
If you want the Hubitat to control your Hue devices directly then that's a simple fix. Remove them from your Hue hub, power down your Hue Hub, remove the Hue hub and Hue App from Hubitat and then connect your Hue devices directly to Hubitat without going through your Hue Hub.
I'd rather leave the Hues on the bridge. Having Hubitat control them through the Hue bridge works fine, and keeping the bulbs connected to it allows me to keep their firmwares updated.
What I would prefer is for everything else that interacts with Hues (like Alexa) to do it through Hubitat rather than by talking directly to the Hue bridge. That used to work fine with the previous Alexa app on Hubitat, and there doesn't seem to be any technical reason why it wouldn't work with the current skill; it's just an odd design choice on the part of the Hubitat developers.
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@Patrick Is there any chance of allowing Hues to pass through the Alexa skill (i.e., treat them like any other device)? It would be great to be able to use Hubitat to control access to the Hues again so Alexa wouldn't get cluttered up with all the Hue groups and scenes. 
It's on the todo list to make it an option you can choose.
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Do I take it that UK users still can't use the new Alexa Skill?
In a fit of enthusiasm, I just tried moving my lighting over to the new skill from the old 'Emulate a Hue Bridge' app. I can select the skill on the alexa app, and I can pair it with Hubitat... and it can even discover devices (I'm only exposing GROUP devices for fear of it blowing up on device limits). However... the alexa app permanently reports 'device is unresponsive', and needless to say... it can't actually DO anything.
Am I being a thickie, or is this still broken for the UK at least?
Best Regards,
Jules
PS. Given the way that Alexa works - this might also be relevant - since I've patched the hub itself... portal.hubitat.com doesn't look to be able to see my hub. It gives me an empty screen. I can connect directly to the hub, and it says that nothing's wrong.
Remove the Amazon Echo app from HE if you’re going to use the Amazon Echo Skill app.
Delete all your devices in the Alexa App and rediscover. Oh, and I cannot highly recommend enough that you assign a group to every device. Do it after you delete all devices, but before you rediscover. Put devices that will always operate together in a single group. All other devices, put in a group by themselves.
Why do this? The reason is if you have to delete all devices for any reason, the groups remain part of your routines. Your routine don’t get messed up. Then you can just sit down at your laptop or desktop and reassign the devices to groups. Very fast and so much easier than scrolling up and down a list that keeps shifting every time you make a change.
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Definitely get up with support@hubitat.com to get your Hub to show up in the portal again. Often this is caused by the hub getting assigned a different tcp/ip address via dhcp. Always a good idea to configure your router to statically assign an address via dhcp to prevent the hub’s address from changing.
Cheers. Yeah... I'd removed the old app and all the devices.
Thanks for the tip on the groups. At the moment, I'm only exposing groups of lights in the first place - I don't like the amount of work it would take to add an individual group to every light - but for now, there's sufficient automation if it can simply voice control the groups, and if that's working properly, I'll move over the ST rules that do things like turn un-hue'd lamps on if they observe other hue'd lamps in the room work.
To be honest... just about every automation system does a really bad job at bulk interfaces for moving lots of devices around. Deleting 100 lights from Alexa's brain is almost unimaginably painful, and ST isn't any better. For Hubitat - at least I can delete a whole bridge at a time, and (slow discovery notwithstanding), that's lass of an arse.
-- Jules
Hmmm, Will do. I definately had the hub on DHCP - I'll stick a reservation in the router for it at least - static IP assignment is a bit tedious on this range - I've already had to stretch the subnet once.
-- Jules
Oh man, either you live in a mansion or your house would be way too bright for me!
Hehe. You can really crank up the lighting counts. The kitchen needs 14 GU10 style lights to light it, for example, and you occasionally get forced into stupid things just to get a light that fits. As an idea... to get an easily automatable picture-light, the only fittings I could find accept two 'candle' style bulbs, rather than a single incandescent strip. So if you've got a run of picture lights going down a corridor, you can easily get to double digits there, too.
In this case... there are 13 groups, of which 2 are hallways (upstairs and downstairs respectively), and 2 of which are exterior. There's another floor that I've not even STARTED on lighting for, but that's another story.
