FAQ: Amazon Echo: The Official SmartThings Integration is here! (Initial SetUp FAQ)

Asked Alex to “Open the garage door” today and it worked out of the box. [Have a virtual switch named, Garage Door (liftmaster) that I previously had to say “turn garage door ON” for]. I think this may be due to their latest integration with Garageio… only that it may be thinking that the virtual switch I have as Garage Door may be a Garageio… not sure.

2 Likes

I’ll have to try that when I get home tonight.

The real question is: Will it close the door if you say: “Open the garage door” and the door is already open?

When I was using Ubi as my voice interface I had a complicated system involving virtual tiles and a SmartApp where it would check if the door was open or closed before following the commands. I’d like to get back to that with Echo at some point… it’s just feels more natural language to say: “Open the garage door” and only have it activate if the door is closed.

On a side note… I am a little surprised that Amazon is allowing ‘open the garage door’ seeing as how they very purposely excluded the ability to open locks via voice. I do have my Echo by a back window in my house. I imagine if someone yelled loud enough even with the window close the Echo might hear it. The one advantage is that I have detached garage so this wouldn’t get them into the house.

For those worried about nefarious unauthorized activation, just plug the dang things into a smartoutlet…

1 Like

Pete,

You can recognize the Sonos as simply an ‘on/off’ device. If you already have a station in memory, simply saying "Alexa, turn on " will turn it on…no volume control, but works just as on/off.

I’m not really worried… just pointing out the seeming contradiction between Amazon’s policy re: Door Locks vs. Garage Doors.

The last part was really just an side thought I guess. I have both my garage doors “hooked up” to Alexa and I’m really not worried about it that much.

Amazon never “purposely excluded” door locks. Quite the contrary, they use door locks as one possible example in their security FAQ. Instead, like thermostats, they just hadn’t gotten around to making any specifics for them. The initially-supported devices were just lights and switches. But they never said they wouldn’t do door locks.

In contrast, harmony specifically will not allow you to do IFTTT control of any activities that include locks, so that may have been what you were thinking of.

During iOS 8, Apple specifically said there would not be homekit voice control of door locks. However, Schlage pushed back on them pretty hard. With the iOS nine rollout, Apple added the ability to train Siri to distinguish between voices. It’s not perfect, but it does reduce the likelihood of random triggering. And they went back to saying that, yes, Siri would be able to open a HomeKit door lock.

Also note that while wink and SmartThings are implemented for echo as “connected devices”, garageio was implemented as a “skill,” which works a little differently.

1 Like

That covers the away from home situation, but not the two in the morning situation or child home alone after school situation.

I don’t think it’s a big deal for most people anyway, but I do suspect there will be kids who try yelling at their friends’ houses. :wink:

[quote=“JDRoberts, post:48, topic:20903, full:true”]
Amazon never “purposely excluded” door locks. Quite the contrary, they use door locks as one possible example in their security FAQ.[/quote]

Wow, really? If that’s the case shame on me for spreading dis-information. I could have sworn I read somewhere that they excluded locks specifically because they didn’t want people to be able to trigger an unlock by yelling to echo.

Maybe… Anyway, I should have done more research before spouting off.

1 Like

From day one, Amazon’s security FAQ for echo had said it can control locks and garage doors, so just take that into account when setting it up and using it. That was in sharp contrast to apple’s iOS 8 policy. Which may have been one reason why Apple did change theirs with iOS nine.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201819970

When you connect devices and services to Alexa, anyone speaking to Alexa can operate those products. This includes products such as garage doors, locks, and appliances.

But there’ve been so many products coming out in this space, including the sort of weird harmony super-restriction on IFTTT, it’s easy to get confused.

A wrote a smartapp a while back so that I could run a tasker task that triggered by door lock via an Endpoint. That way I could trigger it from my SmartWatch (pebble previously, now Android Wear).

But I built in a bit of security… instead of touching the lock itself, the Endpoint triggered a virtual tile. The app would then check to make sure my car was home. If it was, then it would unlock the door. If not, it wouldn’t.

If someone was really security conscious they could do a similar sort of thing and build in the “standard” limitations on the app: “Only during this time, only in these modes” and/or other conditions.

But yeah… I don’t see too many people worried about that right now.

1 Like

If I recall correctly, you have a tilt sensor on your garage to know if it’s open or closed, correct?

Do you have a relay hooked up at all to the garage door opener yet?

1 Like

And of course if you have a Prime Music account you can play that with Alexa itself. But yes, as others have said you can turn Sonos speakers on/off with Alexa/Echo.

1 Like

Okay, the Linear zwave is connected to your garage door opener already?

I can’t see the Nest nor the schlage in the Echo devices list permissions…

any ideas why?

At the present time, echo only recognizes switches and bulbs. Nothing to do with smart things, that’s true of any Home automation controller connecting to echo.

To get around that, you can use a virtual switch to stand in for the other device. So echo thinks it’s a light switch, but smartthings Will get the request to change that switch on then go ahead and do something with your other device.

The lock is fairly easy to deal with, you just make turning on the switch to be unlock and turning off the switch to be lock.

You can search the forums for associating a lock and a switch for ways to do that. Here’s a good one (this is a clickable link)

Thermostats are much more complicated because of all the different things you might want to do with them. There are a couple of community members who are using a virtual dimmer switch to represent a thermostat but it might not give you all the features you want.

Talk to the people in the following topic about the thermostat, but it may be a less defined process at this point:

Hopefully over time echo will add more device classes, so we won’t have to do these kind of workarounds. So you could also just wait for that if you like.

1 Like

For information on the incompatibility between Echo and the brand-new Phillips hue 2.0 HomeKit – enabled hub.

The discovery process for the new Hue bridge has changed as far as when you press the button on the bridge. This is why echo on its own cannot discover the new Hue bridge. Amazon says they’re working on it. Phillips says Amazon need to make a software change to echo. Because a SmartThings/Hue Bridge is a custom integration rather than the standard Hue integration, it looks like that may be unaffected.

If your SmartThings hub is able to connect with your new HomeKit enabled hue bridge, you should be able to authorize the hue bulbs as SmartThings devices By using the echo app rather then the SmartThings app to do the device authorization. This is the reverse of my usual advice, which is to use the native connection to echo. But it might be the only way to make it work for now.

If you do run into a problem, report it to all three companies, Phillips, Amazon, and SmartThings.

Hopefully Amazon will get this fixed soon. But meanwhile, doing it this way should give you echo control of the bulbs via SmartThings to the bridge, plus HomeKit control of the bulbs via its direct connection to the Hue bridge.

Phillips support now says that Amazon has applied the necessary fixes to support the Hue 2.0 bridge. You need to check in your Alexa app to make sure your Echo is updated to at least 2723:

Philips explanation:

http://www.developers.meethue.com/content/amazon-echo-and-hue-bridge-20

Amazon instructions

Yes! It will work when you say Open the garage door and Close the garage door…

I was extremely happy about that…

You can also say things like, “Alexa, dim the lights a little bit” or “Alexa, turn down the lights a little bit”.

well, you can when ST is working!!! hahahahhahahaha

2 Likes

I have four WeMo switches and I am using Amazon Echo with the connected home SmartThings integration. My problem is that I set up a switch in ST app and it works fine in the Alexa app there are 8 entries that look like these two.

  1. Front Outside Lights
    SmartThings
  2. Front Outside Lights
    WeMO
    Alexa will not work as there are two entries with the same name, so I click the WeMo entries and click forget for each one. But within a half hour they reappear. I haven’t been able to figure out how to prevent Alexa from creating these duplicate entries. Anyone figure out how to do this? I have contacted Amazon support and they are sending it to the Alexa developers, but now it is a real pain to say the least.

This is simple… I ran into the same problem.
Here is how you fix it.

In the ST mobile app go to SmartApps
Open "Amazon Echo"
Click on “My device List” to go into the configure (this is where you choose the devices that Echo will see)
Un-check the boxes that are associated with the WeMo switches.
Click next until done.

Open your Alexa mobile App
Navigate to your connected devices list.
Click forget on all of the WeMo devices (so there are none in there)
Have Echo discover your devices. It will find the WeMo devices now, but only one instance of them.

The Problem ~ Echo is discovering the devices in both the ST environment and your WiFi environment. This is why there are multiples of each. It will not control them properly like this, you must create a group and put all of the identical ones in the group.

Perform the steps above and you’ll have no problems.

Edit:
Doing this allows you to have voice control of the WeMo devices with Alexa and you can control them via ST.

1 Like

Looks like you’ve set up both the ST and the Wemo integrations in Alexa. Go into the ST Alexa SmartApp and deauthorize (uncheck) those switches, then in the Alexa settings, have her rediscover ST devices. Same thing happens to people with Hue integrations.

Not sure if you can do something similar to turn them off in the Wemo integration if you prefer. You could also just create a one bulb group in Alexa for each switch, but you’d need to use a new name.

1 Like