I just reprogrammed my Echo to use “the house” instead of “smart things”. It works perfectly.
So, “Alexa, tell the house to activate evening mode” works…
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And after @zpriddy adds his next enhancements, you could do this:
Alexa, tell the house to say Party Time!
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Needs more branding!
“Amazon, tell SmartThings, an independent subsidiary of Samsung, to turn the lights off.”
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So maybe I should set up both.
“Turn on hallway lights” for lights via the bridge hack
and
"Tell the house to activate night mode" for modes and other stuff using the ASK method.
I guess I was thinking I had to use one or the other. My wife would mainly use lights only so the simpler command would work great for that and I would be the one doing more advanced tasks.
Running both at the same time should not cause any problems, right?
Yeah @Tyler that would definitely increase the WAF 
Ya, they should co-exist, even with the same devices.
The cool thing about Hello Home phrases is that it gives you a way to use common verbal phrases to command simple actions instead of “turn on hallway lights”. For example, “tell the house to say Bright Hall”. The actual phrase is what is customized, turning on the switch is what happens.
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As long as I can come up with Hello Home, Mode, Switch, and Group names that are unique across that entire set of domains, then I’m perfectly happy to say:
- “Night mode on”
- “Turn on movie mode” (where Movie Mode is actually a Hello Home Action).
Etc.
All the above can be done with the Hue Bridge emulation method.
@tgauchat,
Can you do modes and HH phrases with the emulator? I thought it only did switches. I’m still trying to learn what all the emulator can do. I guess I thought the only DeviceType that worked was Switch.
Thanks,
Scott
I’m in the process of adding that functionality.
Echo will only send switch name, on, off, dim level.
So most deterministic way to handle this is make sure your Hello Home Actions all start with a keyword different than a Switch. I’ll keep you posted, but ideas welcome.
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Perhaps just use a virtual switch? I guess the down side would be having a lot of virtual switches.
Exactly.
I have nothing against Virtual Switches or other Devices when necessary, and that is definitely an OK short-term solution to the Echo via Hue Bridge Emulation integration.
But since we can arbitrarily enhance the Emulation and/or related Endpoint SmartApp, Virtual Switches aren’t the optimal solution.
I will be patiently waiting
I finally got the HeloHome phrases working with the ASK code 
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Having a break through on something like that is a great feeling. Congratulations!
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Where do I get information on the hue bridge hack? I see @zpriddy thread but would like to look at both.
I followed this by @nelemansc. The emulator and @zpriddy’s can work hand in hand as well.