I haven’t tried it yet but I am disappointed already. You can only enable it for a single hub(I have 4 and they even say to use Yonomi if you have multiple hubs).
The only advantage this has is you can now control favorite channels or Roku channels.
https://support.myharmony.com/en-us/harmony-experience-with-amazon-alexa
This is a fail. Even if you don’t select the activities to use within Alexa, you cannot name your favorite channels with the same name. For example, if you have an activity that you were using with ST/Yonomi/IFTTT called “watch NBC” and a favorite channel you’d like to name called “NBC”, it won’t let you even if you didn’t import that activity. It’s appealing to use favorites and delete my activities, but I want to test I first…
Was hoping they fix this before the official announcement. It’s been months in beta and handling multiple hubs was requested since day 1. Pretty disappointing. The skill works reliably for activities but to make favorites work, it may require a lot of fine tuning.
ugh, I’m in the middle of installing a paver patio and now I have to Dick around with this. At first I had some issues with Alexa-ST-Harmony integration so I went Alexa-IFTTT-Harmony. I eventually got it to work with ST so I now I have both and I don’t really need this but of course I’ll have to check it out.
I can’t even change the volume level !!!
Big time fail. I’m going to stick with the integration that I custom built (using stuff already posted here) where I can run device level commands also.
LOL and the consensus is in. The only people who I think can benefit from this are people with a single hub and Echo device. Otherwise, your stuck using multiple technologies and phrases and neither provides a seamless experience across the home. Amazon needs to advance the Echo where you can tie certain devices to echo’s and Harmony needs to allow for more integration than one hub with volume control.
Yonomi will continue to be my Harmony integration as it’s rock solid and easy to configure.
Well my SmartThings Harmony control never seems to switch off activities, so I’ll use this.
Seems like a poor effort though, volume control was an obvious addition.
What a limited integration, hope they improve it.
Does anyone know if that is going to break current Yonomi activity integration? For example, I have a “Turn on Disney Channel” activity that fires with Yonomi. Is this now going to be a reserved word and break Yonomi setups?
Harmony even recommends Yonomi in their article, so you should be fine providing the actual verbiage is different. For example, if your Yonomi verbiage is “Turn on Disney Channel”, don’t give a friendly name of the same in the Harmony integration. Although, I can’t see that really causing a problem as one of them still should fire and do what you want…
The one hub control is a dealbreaker for me, so won’t be enabling this skill. Just hope it doesn’t break current Yonomi setup.
Will not affect your Yonomi integration. I have been running both for months with no problems. The only reason I use the Harmony integration is that it enables my favorites as individual devices. No need for extra SmartThings virtual devices. But other than that, Yonomi is the best!
I experimented with “turn On ESPN” or “turn on hgtv” but the fact that it changed activities made it too time consuming to add an activity for every channel I like. Also I custom programmed some of the remote buttons for when I’m watching tv so I’d have to do that for every channel/activity. I’ve been meaning to do the volume thing but the one time I did it with the receiver listed as the only device it , obviously, turned off my tv when I entered that activity. So I guess I could program “turn up/ down tv” as 2 activities and “turn up/down stereo” when only listening to music and don’t need the tv on. I would like it if harmony added ‘actions’ to ‘activities’ and ‘devices’ so when you say ask for a specific channel or volume change you don’t have to change activities.
I was reading the link while trying to get some work done and I’m a bit confused? Since I have alexa linked to harmony and they ifttt I kept the activity names the same on the harmony app, ifttt trigger phrase and I’m the ST things list to make it easy. If I say trigger than it goes thru ifttt, if I say “turn on” it goes thru ST. Well according to what I read the direct Alexa to harmony you also use the phrase “turn on” so how will it know what to do?
Completely agree! Logitech needs to improve Harmony in a lot of ways…
And Amazon definitely needs a “zone” or “room” paradigm in conjunction with their SmartHome integrations. Then you tie each Echo to the “zone/room” it resides in. For devices in the primary “zone”, you could just say “turn on lights” or whatever; and yet still use “turn on the lights in the den” or something to cross zones.
The least Harmony could have done was enable multiple hubs like the upcoming Sonos integration, but maybe it wasn’t an option yet.
I think with Google Home now becoming a competitor, Amazon will step up their game. We are already seeing it with the multi-context aware voice recognition from different rooms. It’s only a matter of time that they advanced the Smart Home features further.
I’ve only got one hub and I bought that only because I wanted to be able to tell Alexa to turn on the tv.
I had to say, Alexa turn on watch tv.
I set this up this morning and now I just say Alexa turn on the tv.
Since I use the hub in a very limited way… I’ll look more into this.
With SmartThings you can say “Alexa turn on TV”, just need to make a group on Alexa, name it TV and select activity of harmony “watch tv”.
Using this skill or create a group in Alexa app, is basicity the same thing, at least for the people that have SmartThings.
I was hoping for this skill to work with “volume” and change “channel”, waiting for V2 ( and hoping the Sonos app is not the same bs) .
Yeah i do that with a lot of things. Like in my guest room. I have guest room lamps in ST. But in Alexa I have several groups with my parents and in laws names… “Debras lamp”.
That way they feel more at home calling the stuff theirs instead guest lamp.
So the harmony integration doesn’t do channel up or volume… hmmmmm
The only difference is now, you can use Favorite Channels (or Roku Channels), which is a lot cleaner than using separate Activities per channel.
Can it do individual commands, like play, pause, volume up/down, left, right, select? If not, I’ll keep using sushilks custom integration I have set up.