SmartThings + Amazon Echo Official Integration

Announcements
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We’re happy to announce that SmartThings is partnering with Amazon to bring your voice to your smart home with Alexa. With SmartThings’ open developer platform, a variety of opportunities are enabled to create robust solutions via voice control. With the perfect timing of inviting you to pre-order Samsung SmartThings Hub, popularly known as HubV2, ‘Alexa’ gracefully interacts with SmartThings by using any device that takes advantage of the capability switch.on/off or dim levels.

Check out the blog post here.

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@JDRoberts just wrote an extensive and amazing guide on how to connect your echo with your SmartThings. @JDRoberts just wrote an extensive and amazing guide on how to connect your echo with your SmartThings.*

*i may have stole this joke format from Ben’s most recent tweet.

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Very nice demo, encouraging how accurate it was!

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i think at one point, Eliot called Alexa ‘Alexra’. Unlike most, I think she’s very forgiving.

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He did, I chuckled. I don’t think Alexa found if funny. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Congratulations ST Team! It’s the next best thing after sliced bread :smiley:

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I got mine working and it’s really cool. Now to get a 2nd Echo and a V2 hub.
Can’t wait until SmartThings can push notifications back like Sonos.

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This is epic, and exactly why I had got the extra Echos when they were on sale hoping that they would get here.

Very good integration, and working very well so far. I wish modes and hello home phrases were supported but the virtual switch work around works well.

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To make it less awkward use activate or start instead of turn on when addressing your virtual switches.

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@thrash99er are you using more than one Echo and if so how are working for you? Thanks I"m thinking of getting another one for upstair and using one downstairs.

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Exactly which devices are you using “activate” and “start” with?

I talked with Amazon support, they said “start” was a Music command, which is also my experience. (Alexa tries to find a song with that name.) They didn’t know anything about “activate” and that’s not working for me either.

Are you using the official integration, or something else like zpriddy’s ask version?

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My housemate and I each got an echo a few months ago. We started out with just having one set up for a few weeks and then added the second one. So we have one in the living room and one in his room. Works fine. We use different awake words for the two devices because the one in his room and the one in the living room have some overlapping control areas and that way we never had a problem of the two trying to execute the same command at the same time.

We have two Amazon accounts, and different music libraries, and that works fine. But we made them combined for echo so that they are set up as two different profiles. We only have to add devices once and they are available to both echoes. To get the other music we just have to tell the device to switch from one profile to the other.

Used to be there was only one alarm and only one timer, but now you can have more than one so we just agree how are using those.

So basically the devices for home automation are available to both echoes, no problem, The music is separated by profile but we can set both echoes to the same profile if we want.

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A virtual device that controls two light bulbs and another virtual device that runs a mode change.

I have a virtual button that triggers a mode change called “Goodnight”

I can say Alexa start goodnight and it fires.

Official integration. I will post a youtube video shortly.

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Very interesting! Does the virtual device show up as a “light” or a “device” in the echo app device list?

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Start and activate are both working on SmartThings Light(dimmable)

I configured one to be just device, and you are right it does not work. I will make some notes on my button code that does work and push it up to github.

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So if it’s a dimmable light, you have more voice options?

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Using “activate” would work so much better for HH phrases and modes. @jodyalbritton, do we have to have Github enabled to see your button code or can it manually be added (the old way)?

I can’t wait to get started setting all of this up.

Thanks,
Scott

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Best news I have heard all year long! Thank you ST team for responding quickly to integrate with Alexa.

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What commands can we send TO Echo?

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In terms of your connected home devices, there are just three basic commands you can say to echo: on, off, and dim.

Echo will accept a number of natural language variations of those. So you can say “turn on the hallway,” “turn hallway on,” “Switch on hallway,” etc. but that’s about it.

The only device classes that echo can control are lights, switches, and dimmable lights.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201751280

However, by using virtual switches, you can then get echo control of pretty much anything in the smartthings network because you can tie the virtual switch to a change in mode, or to a hello home action, or to a smartapp.

But The spoken commands to echo are all variations of on, off, and dim.

For more discussion and examples, see: