Alexa and Latest Update

Since Thursday, Alexa no longer works with my Smartthings light dimmers. I can see and use them fine within Smartthings, but Alexa will not discover them. I removed the skill, re-added it, selected the devices and they still appear offline.

It must be a smarthings to alexa integration as it works fine via my Hub V1.

Thoughts?

I have a similar situation, but with door locks. The feedback I had from SmartThings support was that the update wouldn’t have impacted Alexa (or IFTTT additionally in my case), as those are cloud services. I don’t know where the problems are, but I’d recommend you send a note to support to help troubleshoot. At a minimum, they will see a trend (cloud services and connected devices not working suddenly).

Best of luck…

 Joel

Please do reach out to Support so we can take a look.

However, if the device is offline in SmartThings, it won’t be discovered through Alexa.

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So the update seems to made it attach to the wrong location…even though I selected the right one and was showed the list of correct dimmer switches.

I deleted the other one, and resetup the link and poof, it works. Props to support for suggesting this, even though nothing changed on the SM front recently.

First thing to check is if you have multiple locations, if so you cannot have Alexa smartapp installed in more than one. If it is installed in more than one, it is a bit random which one Alexa will communicate with.

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Exactly. Odd that it just decided to use the other one, but that did it.
Thanks

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Great point, Lars!

Indeed… I had about an hour support call with Amazon (and SmartThings support was unable to help me first), only to, myself, discover, while waiting on hold on the phone call, that I had Alexa App installed on two locations.

The bug is something SmartThings needs to fix.

  • When the OAuth process returns the “endpoint ids” for the REST-API, if a SmartApp with the same client-id is installed in more than one Location under the same Account, the OAuth flow returns a map (collection) of ALL the endpoint ids, not just the one the user selected in the OAuth Location select pull-down.
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I didn’t have it installed on both, but I had two locations both called
home so it had its own mind as to which one it would use each day

Effectively:

Alexa integration only works with one location

has become:

Alexa integration only works (reliably) if you have one location

Those are different things, and the second is a step backwards.

https://community.smartthings.com/t/alexa-connecting-to-wrong-hub/76289?u=hellfire51

My alexa found all Smartthings devices are offline, although all are online and I re-installed Smartthings skills in Alexa, discovery still coundn’t complete and claims all Smartthings devices are offline.

This is since the recent firmware update.

OK, so this is a terrible regression.

Points in fact:

  1. It used to work fine to have multiple locations in the same SmartThings account, with different intsances of Ask Alexa at each;
  2. No OTHER web-based app/interface that I’ve found so far has this limitation (Ecobee, SONOS, Hue, etc.)
  3. The Ask Alexa API does not force this - I have 2 different Alexa developer’s account, 1 each for 2 of my 3 locations. I have also created 3 separate instances of my Ask Alexa interfaces (& Lambda code). This allows me, while at any location, to say “Alexa, ask (location name) for a weather report” - where (location name) can be any of my 3 different locations. Granted, for full flexibility, I shall need 9 separate instances of that Lambda code - but I gets what I wants to get that way.

If this is all broken (I can’t test until I go visit one of my other locations), this, as I said, this is a terrible regression and needs to be fixed.