I used to say “Dim living room lights to 50%” and Alexa would set the level to 50%. I could actually say anything as long as the keywords were there: “Alexa kitty cat living room lights 50%” worked fine.
After my v2 upgrade (though probably coincidental timing) saying “Dim” will actually send a relative command subtract the number from the current level. Saying “Brighten” will do the opposite. Saying “Set” will set the actual value. The first time I said “Alexa, dim living room lights 100%” and she said “OK” then shut them off I thought that was a pretty passive aggressive move on her part
I couldn’t find anything on this, did amazon change the behavior? Is this how it always worked and my previous integration wasn’t working right?
Since the insteon integration was announced, they definitely changed some of the home automation behaviours. I haven’t seen any official announcements. But the parsing is now pulling out more words as being specific to commands.
This was really obvious because I use echo for granular control of my television through the smart thing/harmony integration. I can make the volume go up or down, but I had to have two buttons for up and two buttons for down and switch back-and-forth between them because harmony doesn’t let you do the same activity more than once in a row.
I used to have a button called “higher button” and a button called “louder button” and these both stopped working on the same day. Now Echo always interprets them as being an echo command rather then part of the switch name. It definitely didn’t used to do that.
I had to change my switch names to “amplify button” and “booster button.”
I can use any names I want as long as they are not reserved words, but The pool of reserved words has definitely gotten larger.
And, yes, the dim command now require say “set to” to set to a specific level
I suppose it was bound to happen, as they add more device types, they did need to start restricting some of the word usage.
cool details. I don’t use dimming much. What happens when you dim the kitty cat “TO 50%” ? Mine works the same way, “dim … 20%” without “TO 20%”, is relative.
Using keywords (prepositions) “TO” and “BY” seems to make a difference.
I don’t know if this is a recent change, but Alexa interpretation seems to be modified frequently. Maybe by feedback to the Alexa app “did Alexa do what you wanted?”
