One way to troubleshoot this is to enable debug on one of the es devices and look at the command as it's received from the maker api.
This will tell you if the command string is being cleaned before it hits the es device driver command
I set the Debug log and it is exactly as I thought, and described in the prior post. The first two items are issues with Echo Speaks, not Maker API
First off they aren't issues. They aren't useful in any way to the speech output.
Amazon doesn't like special characters so they are replaced.
I don't understand why you can't just use 'and' instead of &
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If your app has purposefully removed some special characters please let us know. I didnt find any documentation stating any characters would be removed. It would have saved me a lot of testing time.
For & ... your app is not removing it. It sends the & to Alexa which triggers an error with the Echo. It would be useful, and remove a definite problem, if your app would replace the & with "and".
With home automation, often input is not manual (we are not editing what the input is) and characters can be in the data sent... like physical addresses, website URLs, date and times, etc
hopefully the Maker API can be fixed so phrases / \ or ? are sent though and not dropped -- otherwise any web address could fail to be spoken
This is super helpful. I haven't given much though to it either. I'm used to just dealing with laptop and smartphone batteries rather than small sensors. What you said above would explain why some of my sensors being at 15% stopped working -- and how I didn't connect the dots and simply thought I'm having mesh issues.
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I am tying to re-authenticate again. but i am still getting a "bad request" error when i log into herku. any ideas?
Are you running the latest server version (2.7.0)?
yes i am using HPM and keeping the stuff up to date.
Hpm can not update or manage the server.
Well i am trying to re-delpoy the server. i think i may of figured out how to do it finally. only took 4 months of asking for help.
Not sure if that was a dig at me, but the process has been in the documentation for over a year!
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Not to mention that question has been asked and re-asked in this thread and answered again just 2 days ago.
I had to log into alexa and heroku in windows on chrome. once i did that and left those open. i was able to then log into heroku and alexa via the app and redeploy the server.
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I don't have a firm date yet. Every day we are optimizing the code more and more and adding more polish.
I feel like the current release is stable enough to run as your production instance.
I also don't have the new docs site ready because I'm not done with the current changes 
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Apologies if this has been asked earlier, but searching thru the posts brought up nothing useful so...
Our Echo devices knows all of us in the family by voice, meaning if we ask "Alexa, who am I?" they respond with, e.g. "I'm speaking to Robert, this is Jim's account.".
Is this information available anywhere other than by asking the device in question?
I guess, what I'm really asking is this; can we execute different actions based on WHO told Alexa to do something using ES? Like, is there a variable containing the name of the person that spoke, and if not, is it at all possible to get this information out programmatically?
Amazon doesn't allow access to this info 
I may have something coming down the line that can help 
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That's what I figured. Too bad. But sign me up for the alpha test of whatever you've got in the pipeline 
Anyone else seeing Echo Speaks as highlighted as high app load in the new 2.2.5 update? Seems to account for over 50% of my average load on the hub. If others aren't seeing this I might need to reinstall it.
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It's my highest app (66% of the 2.5% total load, putting it down to all the websocket close/open events for now. Not too concerned given the 2.5% total load though.
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