New SmartThings Alexa skill (2020)

[orangebucket (Graham)]

@mdunk100

It added all the devices from all 3 locations all together in the Alexa app. I now have nearly 300 devices in the Alexa app, and I don’t know what device belong to what location.

Out of curiosity, does anyone have a use case where this is exactly what they want to happen?

It seems so ridiculous that I feel I must be missing something obvious.

[Its2loud (Mike)]

No. I can’t imagine anyone with multiple locations wants that to happen. They want to be able to pick their location AND choose their devices from each location individually.

[Lars]

@JDRoberts

@all4dom

I’m not but seeing some positive news gives me hope but then again one thing gets fixed & another breaks. This is becoming very tiresome.

To be fair, smartthings staff have never said officially that it was fixed. Just that they are working on it.

The fact that behavior is erratic while they are working on it it’s frustrating, but it’s best to just think of it as still broken until there’s an official announcement.

We are still working on it. As Shimpy previously mentioned, we are making progress and have made changes hence some people are seeing better results.

[h0ckeysk8er (Bruce Pinsky)]

Thanks for the update. I can confirm that whatever you are doing is having positive results. I have multiple routines that trigger off both virtual and physical sensors and they all appear to be activating as I expect.

Thanks!

[johnandy (John)]

Thanks Lars… I’ll remain patient.

I’m using Virtual Smartthings Switches to Turn on and Off Insteon Lights. For me, it seems to take 3-60 minutes for the Smartthings Actuator to Trigger the Alexas Action. It used to be 1-2 seconds with the Classic App.

[erhollander (Evan)]

@Lars @jody.albritton @blake.arnold
Unrelated to the current issue… can you confirm if it is in the roadmap to allow users to choose what devices are visible to Amazon. Please stop ignoring the people who actually use the product and answer the question we all want to know.

Can we control what devices are visible to Alexa.
Can we choose what devices Amazon sees.
If not, why not.

Literally been asked 10+ times and no one will answer at all.

[JDRoberts]

@erhollander

@Lars @jody.albritton @blake.arnold
Unrelated to the current issue… can you confirm if it is in the roadmap to allow users to choose what devices are visible to Amazon. Please stop ignoring the people who actually use the product and answer the question we all want to know.

Can we control what devices are visible to Alexa.
Can we choose what devices Amazon sees.
If not, why not.

Literally been asked 10+ times and no one will answer at all.

This is being discussed in detail with a different staff member in a different thread.

Updates to the SmartThings Platform

Thanks @uberrob - this is helpful information. The team is working on an option to allow for selection of devices that are shared with GH and Alexa which sounds like it should resolve most of the issues you’re having by being able to point GH to the other native services for full functionality and lower latency with those devices. I really appreciate the detailed use case and constructive feedback.

[erhollander (Evan)]

Thank you JD. I appreciate you pointing me to this forum. As you can tell I’ve been getting quite frustrated trying to get all my stuff working again after the migration to the new environment. I know you are in the same boat.

[TEEJ]

Using Alexa has been too much work since this latest SmartThings update. I just switched to google and google seems to handle the duplicates so much better. The duplicates still show up but google is able to deal with them. I have duplicates showing up for Family Room. Alexa gets confused when I say “Alexa turn off family room”. and won’t do anything. Google says it is turning off two switches. It works and I am tired of spending so much time with the Alexa App because of this Samsung issue.

[Lars]

@TEEJ

Using Alexa has been too much work since this latest SmartThings update. I just switched to google and google seems to handle the duplicates so much better. The duplicates still show up but google is able to deal with them. I have duplicates showing up for Family Room. Alexa gets confused when I say “Alexa turn off family room”. and won’t do anything. Google says it is turning off two switches. It works and I am tired of spending so much time with the Alexa App because of this Samsung issue.

Did you check in alexa.amazon.com if you have duplicated devices there? That seems to be the root cause of most of the issues not related to having SmartThings skill installed at the same time as Hue skill etc…

[TEEJ]

I did and deleted EVERYTHING and started from scratch. Alexa continues to find everything, including duplicates.

[nathancu (Nathan Curtis)]

If you deleted all the ST mapped devices ans moved to NewApp’s skill then that happens whe you have specified devices referenced through multiple skills. Like usijg both the SmartThings skill and Hue skill to link the same Hue lamps.

This is intrinsic to the way Alexa handles this situation and you have a few options.

1. dont use multiple skills to refer to devices. Its the one most device manufacturers will recommend because hey they don’t want you to remove their skill. Also not an option for most people.

2. Don’t publish device availability to Alexa - well we all know that ones currently broken from SmartThings side but at least we hear good news coming on that front. But for now we’ll assume we dont have this.

3. find the devices in Alexa and DISABLE the one that you dont want Alexa to use… This is BTW Amazon’s recommended approach. If you have this and have to decide which one gets disabled ALWAYS disable the one(s) with the most hops between Amazon and the device. For instance in our Hue Example, disable the ST version of the device because assuming you are using a Hue hub, to get to the device through SmartThings it takes two hops while with hue, it takes one.

[zerosum74]

Will Echo Speaks still be blocked on Sept 8th if the sensor (virtual and physical) as triggers for Alexa routines problem with this new skill hasn’t been fixed? It just doesn’t seem right to kill off Echo Speaks when the skill isn’t truly ready.

[JDRoberts]

@zerosum74

Will Echo Speaks still be blocked on Sept 8th if the sensor (virtual and physical) as triggers for Alexa routines problem with this new skill hasn’t been fixed? It just doesn’t seem right to kill off Echo Speaks when the skill isn’t truly ready.

According to discussion in the other thread, they are having to kill echo speaks because it is using way too many resources and it is making the entire platform unstable. So they feel they don’t really have a choice on that one. The EchoSpeaks Author is working on a new “echo speaks light“ version right now. You can see that discussion in the echo speaks thread. Look down near the end of the thread for the current discussion.

https://community.smartthings.com/t/release-echo-speaks-v3-actions/173073

[nathancu (Nathan Curtis)]

What @JDRobertssaid, and yes, you can put safe money on it being blocked. At least we have warning this time. The same thing happened with ArloPilot two years ago for the same reason and one day we just got an email, and poof the smartapp disappeared from our IDE installs. I suspect they will use the same mechanism so one morning ES will just disappear.

Follow the ES thread as Tonesto is already hard at work on a lite version that can replace some of the functionality without the parts that’s hammering ST’s Groovy IDE.

[zerosum74]

I understand the need to shut ES down for the good of the platform.

My selfish concern is the announcements that I have set up for doors, motion, leaks, family members arriving, etc. that currently work with Echo Speaks in WebCore and simpler ones that used to work in Alexa routines with the old skill but just aren’t working reliably with the new skill. I’m fine with moving over from ES to virtual switch/sensors as triggers in routines since that was what I was using before I discovered ES but it has to work.

I know they’re working on a fix. It’s just frustrating.

I do look forward to a lite verison of ES though.

[rumrunner424 (Dave)]

Till ES lite comes around, I am going back to my pre ES solution - BigTalker, Raspberry PI and VLC . Worked well for many years.

[johnandy (John)]

Hi Lars,

I just want to confirm that I do not need to make any changes yet to Smarthings or Alexa.

I have a total of 9 Virtual Smartthings Switches that triggers an Insteon Scene within the Alexa App (routine). They all worked within a few seconds while using the Smartthings Classic App. I migrated about 2 weeks ago.

I have gone onto Alexa.com and removed all duplicates and also disabled all Smartthings Devices that I don’t plan to integrate with Alexa.

With the new Smartthings App, the Alexa Routines (triggered by the Smartthings Virtual Switches) take 1-30 minutes to execute and is not consistent.

Continue patience or make changes?

Thanks,

John

[woodsby (Samer)]

My wife is starting to get impatient - she can no longer preheat the shower with the light switch (and associated virtual sensor).

What’s confusing me is why some people have this working again, some have it working with significant delays and some don’t have it working at all.

[Lain]

Tested SmartThings Alexa Virtual Contact controlling Alexa Routines on Monday (Aug 24) and they are working!
Not sure when they started working thought because I only just tried them again Aug 24th but whatever SmartThings did I can run Alexa Routines.

The routines are triggering in about 4-5 seconds, which is understandable because I’m using a Brilliant Smart Home Control to trigger the SmartThings Alexa virtual contact, and then the Alexa virtual contact is triggering the Alexa Routine and then the Alexa Routine is triggering a Coway AirMega. So I’m going through 4 clouds (Brilliant, SmartThings, Alexa, Coway).