Does anyone know of a good way to use a 2D home design software or something similar to map out a house for non-tech-savvy residents? I’m sure this has been done before among installers.
The idea is to print out a blueprint of the home showing devices, names, and schedules so they can see everything on a sheet of paper. Then they will all have a better idea of which voice commands to use and exactly what kind of automations to expect.
Lots of people have done this, and there are even some commercial products, but except for very visual people most end up preferring a more conventional “dashboard” control panel, in part because you can get a lot more information on a 10” display.
If you really want to go with a Floorplan, home assistant has a good add on…
But before going down that path, read the following thread on control panels:
Sharptools , actiontiles or native ST app for your wall panel?
Yeah, ActionTiles has been on the back burner for a while now. No one I know is even close to the point of using an app or a tablet yet. Maybe in a few months.
They just requested paper for voice commands. I found a couple of mapping programs for Windows, but it’s a somewhat lengthy project, and I haven’t gotten to taking it up yet. Was just wondering if there’s something industry-specific for this.
I wouldn’t say this is industry specific, but you could put together a floor plan with symbols for the devices pretty easily with Microsoft Visio. It’s much more simple than using a CAD program, for example. It’s drag and drop with walls, windows and doors that snap into place. The you can annotate the floor place with symbols for your varied devices, and even place comment boxes that could contain voice commands, etc.
See the following topic for some ideas:
(The topic title is a clickable link)
BTW, since that was written, Amazon added location awareness, so now
“Alexa, lights on”
works in every room for just the lights in that room. This vastly simplified guest instructions. 
