Finally voice controlling my Somfy blinds

[JDRoberts]

A lot of people have mentioned the “close” issue – – it comes up with garage doors, also.

The best thing is to put in a feature request to Amazon (you can do that through the official Amazon app) because it seems to be their issue.

Echo Naming Quirks

Please add more as you find them. echo does not do well with device names that include numbers, like "kitchen 1." If you have a device with a name like this, and you don’t want to change it because you like having that name for your smartthings dashboard, then just put the device into an echo group of one and give it a group name that echo does like. Echo does not like the group name “everything.” Some possible alternatives include “house” or “all devices” Echo will always accept “turn on” or “switch on.” Iris has a list of 20 “basic” command formats for switches and thermostats that echo should always accept (although using a rigid command format sort of defeats the purpose of having echo’s natural language skills). But at least you could use these to test a particular prob…

I use the IFTTT trigger method, because then I can use any phrasing that I want. So you could say “Alexa, trigger close blinds” and that should always work. But it does require using the “trigger” phrase format.