[NO LONGER SUPPORTED] Ask Alexa

Why are you trying to control them in the context of the room…why not just dim them individually through device control? Or am I missing what you are talking about?

Chances are I am confused. When I say “Alexa tell the house to turn on Family Room & Living Room” what I expected was that the Family room Lamp would come on at 100% and the Den Dimmer at 50%. If my view on this is wrong why does Ask Alexa allow changing dimmer setting for one device? Of course I am probably off base.

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Ok…so the ‘assumption’ here is that Family Room and Living Room are separate ‘groups’…if that is the case you will have the ‘Family Room’ lights set up to go to 100 when it hears ‘on’, and the Living Room lights go to 50% when they hear on. This again, assumes the lights you are referring to are in separate rooms.

If you could break down the room design (i.e. These lights in this room), and then your expectations I am almost betting we can figure out how to accomplish what you are looking for.

Sorry, I just mentioned two Rooms, the family room has both lights one for 50% and one for 100%. I want to do the same thing for the living room. But they won’t always be on at the same time.

I didn’t see that. Oh my. This opens up many possibilities. Thank you!

So the thing about group is that they tend to keep everything in sync. I did put in logic so you could granualize some of the devices but for the most part you treat a group as a singular object.

Instead if there is just an initial state you want to start with on the turning on of the lights you are better off setting up a macro or macro group.

I was looking for the easier of the ways, but I guess not as robust. I will go to a Macro if I find it a necessity. Thanks.

Let me know if you need assistance :slight_smile:

Thanks, but by now Michael you should know I am a perfectionist, and I look for problems where there aren’t any.

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Newest version released today:

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Hi Michael,

With the addition of the occupancy app, do we have the ability to set the occupancy to a particular state, e.g engaged/vacant? If so, how should it be phrased?

Yes…you can either do that by the device name (i.e. Alexa, tell Smart Things to set {occupancy device} to ‘enabled’)

You can also associate the device with a room and simple give the same type of command to the room: Alexa, tell Smart Things to set {room name} to ‘enabled’

Let me know if that helps.

I’m pretty new to ST, but i’m working in IT.
I manage to install it pretty well, but I lot of step is require and I don’t think some non-IT person will try those steps

will try it tonight with the group extension and refresh my amazon

thanks a lot

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I am improving the process, but glad you were able to get it installed! Let me know if you need any assistance.

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Welcome to another Friday update. Lots of free time now that football season is over!

I am getting a lot of positive feedback on my last update of Ask Alexa. People are really enjoying the integration with @bangali’s room occupancy! This app is also found in the Community Installer, which I recommend everyone check out!

Upon posting the last version of Ask Alexa, I immediately started integrating the deviceID (which is the speaker you are talking to) into the various parts of the app So, with the next upgrade you will be able to do the following:

  • Set up a ‘room’ with its associated ‘Echos’ (i.e. “Alexa, tell smart things to associate this {room name}”)
    You can set up restrictions of what will run and what won’t based on which device is being spoken to (so you can now set up ONE instance of Ask Alexa, but now have rooms access only the things you want them to access).
  • Use shortcuts like ‘in here’ ‘this room’ ‘this group’ instead of using the room name. For example. “Alexa, tell smart things to turn off this room” will result in all switches (on/off devices) to turn off. The beauty is that same command can be used in every room you have set up and each one will react different based on how you have it set up.
  • In future releases (probably not the this one) you can even take this to the next level by setting up a invocation skill with “in here”, “this room”, or “this group”. So the command could be shortened to “Alexa, turn off this room” or “Alexa, turn off the lights in here”.

It is really cool to get back to finding new things out and integrating them into Ask Alexa. For example, if you have two separate skills using the same Lambda you find out that the deviceID is unique per skill. So it doesn’t use the actual device’s MAC or serial number (unless it is a hash of those). Either way, kind of cool to be in ‘development mode’ again.

I don’t know when I will be releasing the new features, but I anticipate within the next 4 weeks!

In other general Alexa news, I found (quite by accident) that you now have US West (Oregon) as a valid datacenter for Alexa skills processing (Lambda). As is typical in IT, since I know it is different it “feels” like this new datacenter is faster to respond, but hard to tell. Either way, I have updated the documentation with the new information.

Finally, I anticipate having some GREAT news to announce in the next couple weeks! Keep an eye out here!!

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Since I am in CA I tried this and I don’t see an difference. Since you are going back and forth from Amazon to SmartThings, which I assume is also hosted in Amazon, I would bet that you could actually put more delay into the ‘round trip’ even if you choose a datacenter closer to you.

Good to have a disaster recovery option for Alexa skills no matter what!

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I have a general question to anyone with advice: I have gone through the setup several times and keep getting the following error in setting up the configuration in AWS Developer:

Error: Please make sure that “Alexa Skills Kit” is selected for the event source type of arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:…

Tried several times and can’t determine the cause - help would be great!

This is caused by not having the Lambda code in either the wrong datacenter (Oregon or Virginia) or you have it in the correct datacenter but don’t have the skill setting properly configured.

In the Lambda it is at the top of the main configuration page:

Let me know if that helps.

What quick response - Very impressive.

This did help. I figured it out. I had 2 browser sessions open and the save in AWS wasn’t taking. I closed all browsers and went back in and saved and it worked. Thanks!

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Glad you got it going! Let me know if you have an issues with it or questions.