I'm currently working on creating a smart home setup with Amazon Alexa. I'm in the testing phases, but am quickly realizing that Alexa may not be the best solution because it is not capable of isolating control of devices within certain rooms.
i.e. If I place an Echo Dot within Guest Bedroom #1 it will still control or get confused with devices outside of the Guest Bedroom regardless of whether they're in the same group or not.
I tried setting up different accounts but that's a no-go because the device looses Drop-In, and other functionalities.
So I was wondering if there was a better solution via Apple, Google or something else that would allow voice control with devices that are within one room only.
I believe Google Home devices will recognize you want to control lights and other devices types that are in the same room, without needing to refer to them by their full name. So commands like "Hey Google, close the blinds" or similar.
Google Home does allow this. However, I have issues when running named routines where it doesn't understand me. Saying "Hey Google, close the shuttle bay" sometimes results in playing random music from pandora
I can turn on all lights in a room or the ceiling fan based on which Alexa device heard me using same command but I have Node Red running on a Raspberry Pi for the logic. The critical Node Red Node used has been flaky lately for some.
For example, I say "It's hot in here" and fan in room I am in turns on or I say "illuminate" and the lights that I selected in Node Red will turn on.
There is also another method I just discovered combining with Home Assistant and BT that determines your location in house based on your phone but I just started experimenting.
Both methods are more complicated than many would want to tackle.
I thought I had read that Alexa will turn on lights within the same group without being referred to by their complete name, but this didn’t work with other devices… eg. TV’s. For those, I thought I had seen people using node red to work the logic out.
Yeah Alexa will sometimes understand what room it is in. But others it will get confused and say the device shares the same name than x, y, z. Specifically for lights or lamps.
I tried creating different accounts but that just messed up the hubitat integration with my main echo hub.
It's almost as if I'd need the ability to install several Echo integrations within Hubitat, or have one hub per room so that I could segregate the devices via integration. Just not sure if that would work with Hub mesh.
