I don’t know where I went wrong, folks. She says she doesn’t want the house talking to us. Maybe I’ve been tinkering too much? Maybe the master bathroom light automation has gone through too many failed iterations? Is there any hope left for this house?
fAF (Family Acceptance Factor) typically falls for two reasons: not enough reliability and too much complexity. At our house, my housemate started unplugging things The day he was walking out of the kitchen during a playoff game carrying a bowl of popcorn and the lights went off at the same time that the television started randomly changing channels. 
But there’s also the issue of aesthetics. Some people love spoken notifications or lights that change color, others find this kind of proactive automation intrusive and annoying. That aspect varies from person to person, so it’s just something that you have to work with like all the other household issues where you have different aesthetic preferences.
If only one person in the family likes getting proactive notifications, it may work to have nonemergency notifications come in on the phone or smart watch just to that person.
But the first step is definitely reliability. Without that, other household members will tend to reject automation all together rather than individual features. 
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Thanks for the thoroughly thought out response to my tongue in cheek post. 
She’s on board with pretty much everything else. I admit I tinker constantly, so I do have to be diligent about making sure things perform as intended, and as a result it rides the line between being convenient and being annoying. Ever so slightly leaning towards convenience though.
We have push notifications for various things, and she mentioned that was enough. The general idea is that we are always so distracted by our phones and whatnot, that our home should be a sanctuary from that distraction. I sort of agree. Even though deep down I want the spaceship to beep at us.
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I use a combination of lights flashing, notifications and text.
I want to know what’s going on sometimes without bothering others. For these, I use text. Same thing for others.
Push Notifications are used when everyone is in agreement that the house should notify us of an event.
Wife HATES the lights flashing. These are nag alearts intended for the children to perform a task that is past due. The restriction is, “If wife is home, then don’t do it!” I repeat, do NOT flash them darn lights!
This has been working well. However, considering my phone is dinging at least 2-3 times an hour, I now realize that I have overdone it…
I have over 200 automations and for the most part, the family is unaware of about 175 of them. I consider that as being uninstrusive!
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Oh yeah about the chime…That was the first thing my wife ripped out. Drove her crazy in less than 2 days…
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sorry but I lol’ed. through the post I relived the eye roll or acceptance sighs I sometimes get from the wifey. good times :O)
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nope, sell it all to me for $5 
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I’m gonna use the less politically correct acronym WAF.
And mine has taken a true turn since the Echo Dot came along. It now even extends beyond Alexa, to the control tablet and my various reminders via AutoNotification. The control tablet runs SmartTiles, and one of those tiles visually indicates whether the garage door is open or closed. So I had the tablet off for a couple weeks while wife’s mom was with us, in order to minimize some of my automations so mom would be less confused. But once mom left, wife wanted the tablet back on. And when the first “calendar reminder - take out garbage and recycling” spoke up again, my wife said “that’s good! I missed that!”
And now Alexa can control Sony Android TVs.
Things are beginning to progress more rapidly.
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Lolz, I stopped teaching my wife and kids. Now they just copy what I do that they find convenient. My toddler quickly learned Hey google turn on the wii. While the wife always uses Google turn on/off the tv and lights. I found automations that are intrusive have to go.
The door chime of a cash register got old fast so i uploaded a much softer sound on lower volume, both the wife and i love the spoken announcement after 9pm, of which kids door has just opened. The Alarm arms itself at night and that was hard for the wife to get used to, even armed home. My closest experience to yall’s is our hue color bulbs above our bed. They come on different colors depending on the notification, like red for alarm, green for toddler doors opening late at night, etc. Anyway, she got pissed and vetoed my whole hue intricate scheme in the bedroom. Otherwise, the family is very supportive and they love it all when it works.
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My wife moaned about the bathroom lights being automated, but one morning she woke me up demanding to know why she had needed to turn the lights off using the pull cord, when they were supposed to go off on their own, turned out she had turned them on using the pull cord, and they are programmed to stop on if that is the case.
WAF went through the roof, the day the speakers announced that due to the hot weather the heating had been turned off, she loves saving money lol.
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I have a bit of a horror story. Upon migrating everything from CoRE to webCoRE, I got some things terribly wrong. One night I decided to sleep on the upstairs futon instead of our bedroom - which I do from time to time just to keep life interesting. She went to bed normally, but something was screwed up with the mode-changing piston. It never flipped over to Night Mode, so the motion detector in the bedroom turned on all the bedroom lights every time she turned over. She kept hitting button #1 on the minimote to turn them off, but that button wasn’t flipping the mode either. She was too tired to come upstairs to tell me about it, so she tossed and turned until the morning. Let this be a lesson!
Thankfully she forgave me, and still thinks home automation is badass.
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lol, i left a piston unfinished last night and basically the bright overhead lights in the foyer would turn right back on after switched after motion, wife woke me up to fix it haha.
the WAF is real