Why? If you want to look at all your contact sensors, simply use the filter at the top of the page.
I don't know what I would do without search but when you are trying to manage 60+ sensors (contact, motion, humidity, temperature, illumination) along with all you control devices being able to default sort devices by name comes in handy.
You guys act like I have two heads. What I'm asking is nothing new. Using a descriptive name together with a user friendly label has been best practice since the beginning of programming and system automation. The only difference today is we've added voice and speech UI's. but the labels used for site UI's don't work well for the voice and speech UI's. Best practice would be to allow the automator to set the device name, dashboard label and voice/speech label at the device while at the same time allowing those to be overridden, if required, at the UI.
And you can do that...within the voice assistant. And doing this allows each user in the home to "nickname" the devices the way they want without having the system dictate what they are.
And as far as dashboards go...i don't want that defined at the device level. That would mean that the device would have to have the same name on ALL dashboards. I want the aliasing in the DASHBOARD APP where it belongs. That way you could name the sensor one thing on one dashboard and one thing on another dashboard.
I don't know if you realize....I agree with you for the need to rename devices. But I disagree that adding that to the device database is the right place to do it. Doing so would be a fundamental change to the whole platform and every app and driver. Changing it for dashboards means a change to the dashboard app.
Are you saying I can configure Alexa so I could call the Lamp "Table Lamp" and my wife could call the same lamp "Fancy Lamp"? I've been wanting to have the ability to nickname devices once they've been added to a group but haven't seen that yet.
I do not know that...i merely meant each user would be able to assign nicknames rather than having it hard coded in Hubitat. I can't speak to whether users can assign individual nicknames or if one person assigns a nickname if that is persistent across the other users.
I was involved from the very beginning and can tell you that I got HE hub #3 so that I could do that port in hopes that it would become the HE default dashboard, but that never happened. They went their own way and made a respectable product. With that said all of the customization being wished above is available now within HousePanel.
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In the Alexa app create a group called "Table lamp" and another one called "Fancy lamp" and add the same single device to both groups. Then you can refer to it by either name. I sue grooups in the Alexa app to give my devices I want to control short, easy to speak names and leave the device names long and very descriptive.
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You can have devices in two groups in Alexa? You cannot do that in Google home since they are divided by rooms.
In the Alexa app you can create your own groups. For example I have devices 'Kitchen light 1', 'Kitchen light 2', 'Kitchen light 3', in a group I created called "Kitchen light". But there's other groups called "All lights" and "All indoor lights" that contain the kitchen lights too.
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Do Hubitat group devices show up as devices in Google Home? If they do, then one can have multiply-named single-member group devices in GH as well. That can be placed in separate rooms ....
Yes...they come over as color bulbs.
That only means you can reference the Family Room Table Lamp by "Table Lamp" which doesn't really help with the Living Room Table Lamp or the Bedroom Table Lamp.
Alexa and Google should allow us to associate devices to an Alexa (which they do via groups) but then have the ability to give that device an alias. So when I'm in the Family Room and speaking to the Family Room Echo, you can refer to the device by its room alias.
Anyway, that's an enhancement for Amazon Alexa and off topic from my HE request.
Still doesn't address my enhancement request. BTW, I do all my grouping at the HE hub using a virtual device and then pass that to Alexa or Google Home.
In HE
Kitchen Lights = Kitchen Light, Kitchen Island Light, Kitchen Counter Light, Kitchen Range Light, Kitchen Sink Light.
I do the same for Family Room Lights, Dining Room Lights, Home Office Lights, etc...
Interior Lights = Kitchen Lights, Family Room Lights, Dining Room Lights, etc...
All Lights = Interior Lights, Exterior Lights
Then I pass all the physical and virtual lights to Alexa (and Google Home which I use for testing).
I can still group any of these using either Alexa or Google grouping.
I've tested this extensively and found grouping locally is way more reliable, response is quicker and makes management of groups much easier.
This is a good example of how things should be done but doesn't solve any of the issues for which I posted the enhancement.
Now
I also do grouping on the Hubitat side using 'Groups and scenes' to take advantage of the Zigbee group messaging. So the 'Kitchen Light' on Amazon actually only contains one item named "Kitchen light group" rather than the 3 individual bulbs. The shorter name is simply for my convenience of speaking while the longer name makes it more apparent what I'm working with in automations. It wasn't relevant to the discussion at hand, so I didn't go into further detail.
i end up prefexing all my devices with the room, so all devices in the living room begin (LR) then window lamp, desk lamp, tv etc.
just wish for TTS it would ingnor the brackets, the room prexi just makes it easy to find devices and group them to gether, without having the long - living room desk lamp - on a tile
