Alexa, SmartThings and Hue

Long time lurker, first time poster :slight_smile:

I have been planning on getting into HA since we bought our house last spring and my wife got me an echo dot for Christmas which, along with a few straggling gift cards, pushed me over the edge. I initially started with the Hue starter kit which has very quickly got me addicted and moved into getting a ST and a few switches for other rooms where being wife friendly trumped the need for adjusting light temperatures and colors.

I’m now starting to build in automation and pull the ST stuff into Alexa, however I’ve noticed that my Hue bulbs and scenes will pull in with names identical to what they are seen within ST which causes Alexa to get horribly confused. I’m thinking about excluding the Hue skill from Alexa and just using everything via the ST skill, but I’m not sure what I’ll end up missing out on (I don’t use the automation in the Hue, but we do take advantage of the scenes).

Curious what others have done when they have both the Hue and ST being controlled via Alexa.

  • do I exclude the hue bulbs from ST via Alexa
  • do I turn off the Hue skill
  • can I clone the hue scenes into ST? (I like being able to play around with various levels and then capture existing settings as a scene or build one off a photo).

I’m not afraid to dip into a custom DTH or SA to deal with things, but Ask alexa and similar are a bight more complex than I want to get right now as I travel a decent amount for a work and don’t want to end up with phone calls asking how to turn the lights off :wink:

Thanks in advance

Everything controlled from ST. Just add the Hue hub as a device to ST, not the individual lamps. You can then add things to the Echo, and then voice control them. For instance I have an outlet called Media System in ST, and put it into a group on its own in Alexa called Telly. I now say “Alexa, turn on the telly” and everything connected to the ST outlet called Media System turns on! I can also turn sets of lights on and off the same way.

Andy, you must be from Texas. :grinning:

Curious why you said that… I’m actually in the UK!!!

I know. I just picked a state. UK = Telly