Alexa open my garage

[JDRoberts]

@aquaman95

I think I have confused myself in regards to routines. At one point I had created a close garage door and an open garage door routine but couldn’t figure out how to associate them with a virtual switch either.

Here’s the FAQ for associating a virtual switch with a routine and having echo control it.

[DEPRECATED] 2015 Voice Assistant Run Routine FAQ--see 2017 FAQ instead

On October 1, 2016, Amazon added the ability to turn on a " routine" from Alexa. If you want to use that method, see the official support article. https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/210204906-Amazon-Alexa-SmartThings-Routines Note that the official method will not allow you to use echo to run any routine that includes a lock or a Smart Home Monitor armed state change or another device class that Alexa does not know. The method described below in this FAQ will, but it does require that you create a virtual switch. Although at present echo can only request that smartthings turn devices on, off or dim, by using a virtual switch, you can tell echo to turn that switch on or off, and then have all kinds of things happen in smartthings. For example, if you want to have echo tu…

If you use Alexa helper to set up the Association, you can have turning on a binary switch execute routine a, and turning off the same switch execute routine B, which is a voice command format that a lot of people return prefer. So you can say “open the garage” and “close the garage” and it should run the two routines appropriately.