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?)
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?)
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