I don’t need the back & forth chat. I’m sure that Amazon will improve that now since GH is competing. Amazon has been able to enjoy being the 1st to bring it to the HA market but without competition they didn’t keep pushing what it could do and now they will have to.
I also had problems with Alexa recognising a SmartThings Harmony activity called “Now TV” and also a Smart Home Group called “TV”. I didn’t really want to rename them to something else as I’d never remember their nick names when asking Alexa to do something. In the end I found changing “Now TV” to “NowTV”, I just removed the space, and renaming the Smart Home Group “TV” to “T.V.” fixed the problem. Alexa now recognises “Turn on NowTV” or “Turn off T.V.” 100% of the time. I’m a happy bunny 
If you do the direct Alexa to harmony integration you can name harmony activities multiple nicknames in the Alexa app and it has a lot less problems with the phrase tv.
This has not been my experience. I have both Google Home (GH) and Echo ( Alexa). With respect to GH and Home Automation (HA) there is no two-way conversation. In fact the HA in GH has been a bit of a disappointment. It has not lived up to the proposed conversational-like interface as suggested in advertising with the arguable exception of Nest integration. For instance, the language for controlling Hue bulbs is IMHO better in Alexa. Alexa seems to be able to understand the same suite of phrasing as GH and then some. GH does not seem to understand words like maximum or brightness even when directly applied against the bulb / light strip / bloom etc wheras Alexa will. Nor is GH able to interface with the lights in a conversational-like way. For example, “Hey Google, brighten the living rooms lights.” followed with “hey google, brighten them some more”. Nope…does not understand “them” even given the implied context.
The GH iOS app for me has been a bit unstable. I have 24 Hue light products (via Hue bridge) and 22 switchable devices (via Smartthings) that occasionally produce a “something went wrong” message when trying to manage them in the app or “there was a glitch” verbal message when talking to GH. I have never seen this occur with the Alexa app. I would hate to think what would happen if I tried to expose the full 100+ devices on Smartthings to the GH app.
Yes the conversation back and forth work 50/50 but it was just released and Alexa can’t do it years later. I am sure they are getting allot of feedback and I’m willing to give it a chance as it’s about as good as Alexa on day one and better outside of ST for question by far! Also on the iOS app it is a Google device and I’m sure the Android version of the app took priority. How many iOS apps are available on Android? It’s pretty much a one way street with Google getting all there services on iOS and not say if you want that by our product. I will guess more people will switch to Android then Google losses if they can’t access Google services on iOS. My app on Android has been rock solid.
I think the GH just came out vs alexa has been out for 2 years isn’t a fair point. First of all they’ve had 2 yrs to study and benchmark alexa and also overall tech has advanced over the last 2 years. That’s like saying a tesla, which has only been around a few years, is a better car than a 1930 Ford and at point in time Ford was around for decades.
The comparison should be straight up what they both are capable of today. Yes in 2 yrs GH, if they don’t abandon it , will be better than it is today but so will Alexa. I’m interested in which will work better for me now and in the future not who had a head start.
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I think it is fair they use different tech. Siri been out the longest and still the worse well it’s gotten much better. Google is much better at answering questions and other things without a single “skill” other then itself. The part it has issue is naming things in ST. That they have to improve. I say turn o n kitchen anything with kitchen along with the room items turn on including the siren named kitchen siren. But overall GH is much better and once the API is opened up who knows.
Thanks Steve. I am assuming this is the Alexa App?
I am having the same issue and deleted them. I still have to go home and test it though