I hope for some advice from you all based on experience.
I currently have alot of smart device:
Hue lights
Nest Thermostat
POPP TRVs
Sonos
To name just a few.
As I have found, naming convention is very important when using voice (i.e; Alexa). What has worked for people? Especially when you have a TRV and light for example in the same room and you want to ask for the temp or turn on a light. Where is best to create the groups, alexa? ST? Anything else I need to think of?
Issue im getting is duplication ATM and alexa finding devices twice due to all the skills enabled.
I struggled with my french accent on some devices names so I had to change them to something that didnât sound similar.
One thing is that the thermostat doesnât need to be named. You just can say" Alexa, set the temperature to xx". If you only have one thermostat, that will be done properly.
For the lights, I go with the room name: Alexa turn on playroom. If you have only one switch named like this, this unicity is enough to get it working.
What I didnât get working with Alexa is: âAlexa, put some freaking good music!â. âOk, here is what I have for drinking musicâ
This is a really great question, and youâre right, now that so many different services are automatically importing information from other services itâs gotten much more complicated than it was last year. This is actually something that Iâve been working on for my own house just in the last month or so.
If your only problem is Alexa, then by far the easiest way to handle it is just to create a unique new group in the Alexa app with a name that you want to say and then put anything else into that group.
You also have the advantage with echo groups that the same device ( except for the echo devices themselves) can be in multiple groups. So if one person in your house says âofficeâ and another person says âstudyâ then you can create one group for each name.
I have an air conditioner that works with echo but for some reason, whenever I say âair conditionerâ echo thinks I said âair conditioningâ and then it will tell me that there wasnât a device with that name. So I made a new group called âair conditioningâ and put the âair conditionerâ device into that group, and now it works fine. I still think Iâm saying âair conditionerâ and echo still thinks Iâm saying âair conditioningâ but now either one will work.
But it definitely can get more complicated than that. Like I said, Iâm working on this right now for my own house, but I havenât really come up with a consistent strategy that I like yet.
Iâve been thinking on this question quite a bit recently.
The problem is that SmartThings was here first, so the rational naming conventions went to it⌠leaving Alexa implementations kinda âstuckâ.
The rational, though short-term laborious, way forward is to think of it this way:
SmartThings = automations = little to no human interaction
Alexa = voice Control = all human interactions
And based on that, rename things in ST such that you can have the ânaturalâ names in Alexa.
Perfect example: kitchen. In ST, rename it âfood prep roomâ or something, and you will no longer have conflicts in assigning that room the name âkitchenâ in Alexa. Thus you will no longer have conflicts in making voice commands within that room. ST only sees a name phrase, and you could call the room Fred or Xavier or Room Three or whatever you want and the automations will continue to function. But trying to make everyone in the house remember to use âfood prep roomâ or âroom threeâ when talking to Alexa? Utterly counterintuitive.
So for my ST automations, rooms now have names such as
LR
DR
EBR
WBR
ExRm
UB
DB
If I tell you the last two are bathrooms, Iâll wager you can guess where they are⌠and then can guess what the other rooms in that list are.
Lol⌠I did have to give a room multiple names to make it work for everyone in the family⌠my 2 year old kid used pronounce âkitchenâ like âchickenâ. By creating a âchickenâ room in the Echo app, he was finally able to turn off the kitchen lights by himself and was very proudâŚ
I still think Iâm saying âair conditionerâ and echo still thinks Iâm saying âair conditioningâ but now either one will work.