Device names vs voice command names

[lowenna]

I was playing with this last night and love that HS3 is adding this natively. I'm coming from the Hue bridge emulator for Alexa integration, and previously Spuds Kinect plugin for voice control (which worked great).

But there are issues... I have quite a few devices where the voice commands I want to use don't necessarily match the device name. For many reasons, I really don't want to change the device names themselves to match as that could make the devices in the HS3 interface not descriptive enough or not clear.

What I'd really like is next to the "Enable voice command" checkbox for a device have a list of names (or 'aliases') to which the device can respond to to voice, and a checkbox to "Only allow these names", which when checked disables the full name of the device as a possibility.

Here's an example of why I might want this (I have many, but this one is fairly straightforward):

Let's say I have (which I do) a switch which controls multiple lights - the porch, the outside garage lights, and in the process lights up the drive. So the device is named "Drive-Porch-Garage". I didn't want to call it "Garage", as that isn't clear when I also have another light switch device "Garage" controlling the internal light for the garage.

The natural way people here would want to turn on the multi-use light might be any of "Alexa turn on|off the "Drive|Front|Porch|Outside|Entrance|... light".

But with the connected home API (and I believe HS3 speech in general, but I've never used it directly until now), we're limited to the name of the device. Now sure, one alternative is to create multiple virtual devices which have matching events tracking the real device, but that's one heck of a lot of overhead. With the hue emulator, I was able to have a "Drive", "Porch" and "Garage" device all triggering the same HS3 event through REST (using that script on one of the boards here to add a REST API). Sure that's overhead too, but not as much as I would have to add directly to my HS3 configuration.

The goal of my suggestion is that that HS3 would advertise three devices to Amazon and the Alexa app - "Drive", "Porch" and "Garage", but not "Drive-Porch-Garage".

(Is there a better place to put suggestions like this?)

[MrMxyzptlk]

I agree that an alias purely for VR would be fantastic.
That way I wouldn't have to change any device names.

[cheeryfool]

Yes, totally agree with this, though I think I recall Rich pushing back on this a few weeks ago.

Don't even think you need a checkbox, just adding a name to the VR box should override the standard name. This should also support multiple names to make it more natural and separate those with a | symbol.

[mstukel]

I agree too. I think it would be very helpful to have an alias feature for physical devices for V/R purposes only. In my case, I have a naming convention I leverage for my devices. The naming convention makes it much easier (for me) when designing HS3Touch screens, but the naming convention does not lend itself for V/R purposes (too complex). As a result, I do not want to change my physical device naming scheme, but it would be very helpful to have alias option just for V/R purposes. I am currently leveraging virtual devices and events for my current integration with Alexa, but this approach does result in a bit of overhead (especially trying to keep virtual devices (created for V/R) in sync with physical devices).

[will.i.am]

I believe you can do what you want using the Create Group feature in the Alexa app. I have a group called Outside that includes the driveway, porch, and front walkway lights devices. I have a device called Garage for the interior garage lights. The group name is independent of the device names that it contains.

[waynehead99]

It's been asked and it's been shot down. The group in Alexa app is kinda a workaround. Problem with it is if you have more than one light in a group, using the group name turns all the lights on or off.

[joey52685]

It's been asked and it's been shot down. The group in Alexa app is kinda a workaround. Problem with it is if you have more than one light in a group, using the group name turns all the lights on or off.

Shot down by who? That's a shame if it's true

Oh well, guess I'll just rename all my devices.

[waynehead99]

There are lots of threads asking for this and home seer response has pretty much been its not happening.

[lowenna]

A group won't work here. That groups multiple devices into one. I need the other way around - one device known by multiple names.

I would need that additional checkbox to ignore the actual device name being advertised as a device in the alexa app, so that just the aliases were shown up as devices

It's a real shame if this is not happening. Can someone point me to some threads where there's an answer from Homeseer that it's not happening? My search skills on this board are letting me down!!

IMO this small addition brings the Homeseer to Alexa integration to a very high level for what is a premium HA solution. I'll be gutted if I had to employ horrible, error prone, and confusing hacks to do what seems pretty natural.

[waynehead99]

There isn't specific threads, but the main one related to the API has some response from HS in it about it.

[will.i.am]

A group won't work here. That groups multiple devices into one. I need the other way around - one device known by multiple names.

You can have just one device in a group. You can have many different groups with the same device in them. You can tell Alexa to turn on either the device or the group.

[lowenna]

Oh, right. That might work as an alternate. Still not as nice as having native aliases built into HS3 though.... Obviously my suggestion isn't Alexa specific, but would surely benefit the overall speech engine in HS3.

[usLEDsupply]

This is the only feature keeping me from switching from the echo hue bridge, With every update i keep hoping they add alias fields for VR but no luck yet:-(

[tbever]

Actually the group feature in the Alexa app works great. If you have some devices with similar names, Alexa will sometimes reply " I found several devices matching that name. Which one do you want?" If you assign a device a more specific unique name under a group, you are much less likely to get that message and more accurate V/R.

One downside to groups I discovered is when the API was upgraded to v2, I had to reconnect HS to the Alexa service, and somehow it doubled all the devices. I had to "forget" all the devices and rediscover them, and all the groups were lost. They were pretty easy to recreate but if you have a bunch of them it could be a pain.