I am about to move over all of my simple Alexa functionality to Home Assistant, and I realized that I need to make a choice: Emulated Hue, or Haaska?
It seems like Haaska must be overall better, to justify the much lengthier installation process that people are willing to go through. However, I don’t see a great explanation of why!
What can Haaska do that Emulated Hue cannot?
Me personally, I went custom intents. Most of my devices are already natively supported in Alexa. (I use IFTTT and Maker to get HA stuff into Google Home). But that’s me and I am actually interested to see comments on this.
I did use HAASKA when I first started but phased it out quickly after reading @aimc’s excellent post on creating custom intents:
I see a lot of people using emulated Hue, which is newer than HAASKA - which has been around for a bit. Not sure if that plays into it. Also realize that emulated Hue is part of HA code so it’s on the same schedule as the rest of HA when it comes to continued development.
That can be both a blessing and a curse though - it also means that there is more of a chance of a breaking change or something in a new version that causes an issue. HAASKA is developed at a slower pace, but is a bit more stable if you go by forum postings about issues. It’s interesting to note that HAASKA doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the docs or on the components pages anymore. At least not as far as I could tell from a site search with Google.
Hope the input is of some help.
Thanks for the feedback! I am very familiar with custom intents as I am an Alexa developer on the side; I plan on using those for more complex functionality, but it will be last resort to force the “ask Jarvis to…” syntax. Whenever it makes lexical sense I want to use the turn-on/turn-off stuff.
Thank you for the note about emulated_hue being newer! That’s enough for me to go with emulated_hue for now, until I notice any problems with that approach. 
I tried to give you the pros and cons, I hope it helped you. I’m still interested in seeing other replies to this too so I hope the thread gains traction.
i use emulated hue for 2 reasons:
i am pretty sure my wife would find it annoying to ask: “Alexa ask homeassistant to …” every time (it doesnt help that we dont have Alexa in our native language, making it harder to get Alexa to understand my wife. i seem to now how to talk to Alexa though)
i dont have a credicard. and allthough you dont need to pay, you need to register with one if you want to use intents.
i havent seen haaska, so that was no option for me 
i did customize emulated hue to make it reqognize input_sliders also. making sentences like: “Alexa set anything to 25” possible.
Hasska doesn’t require you to use any trigger words, it uses the native smart home API, so it can also do the “turn on lights” type commands as emulated hue.
I thought I’d throw my thoughts in this post as I just recently switched my setup from Emulated Hue to Hasska a couple weeks ago.
Emulated Hue pros:
Haaska pros:
Overall, I felt like Haaska, while older, is probably going to be better supported in the future. It seems Hue is wanting people to move to using actual skills linked to a Phillips account and not really planning to continue supporting the interface that Emulated Hue is taking advantage of. Haaska properly uses the smart home API features that Amazon implemented, so it can support all the various devices that the Alexa can support. The development appears to be quite active, so I’m confident they will continue adding new features as Amazon releases them
Ah haaaaaa, thank you @cbulock!
It’s a huge bummer that the native Hue platform is not going to be updated. I really like its speed due to getting to avoid the third party skill overhead cost to timing.
Seems to me that I’ll continue to use emulated_hue until I eventually get RGB lights, at which point I’ll need to make a choice.
Asking myself this questions now… currently using emulated_hue.
I mainly have switches and RGB lights, the RGB light option is not documented on the github page: https://github.com/auchter/haaska is this possible?
I’m also running my own custom skill which I guess I can still continue to use? I like the option to be able to give a custom response like “the temperature in the nursery is 20degrees and all the windows are closed” etc.
When I start adding locks and a garage door motor I’m guessing Haaska will operate better than emulated hue?
Anyone got experience of using both methods? I’ve only ever used emulated hue.
Setting up haaska and ha alexa take about the same amount of work, SSL and amazon account.
I use haaska for
“Alexa, open the garage”
“Alexa, turn on kitchen light”
I use HA alexa skills
“Alexa, tell me the status of the front door”
“Alexa, tell me everything that is open”
“Alexa, tell me the location of John”
I’m very interested in how you did this.
i copied the emulated hue component code to the custom_components directory and then i looked at where the mediaplayer is listened to in the code. the mediaplayer can be set to a %
then i duplicated that code and changed it to input_slider and let it set to that value.
my code wouldnt work at this time anymore because input_slider is now input_number.
so when i update HA (i am still on 0.40) i also need to change the custom hue component.
Interesting! Thanks
FYI. There is a new Alexa smart home skill coming soon which should let you have way greater control than emulated_hue.
without creating skills and the need to say things like “alexa ask … to …”?
I guess we will have to wait and see but it looks promising. The skill is already live in Alexa Skills but can’t use it just yet…here’s one of the many PRs in the last few weeks.
if its a skill it doesnt change anything.
you still need to say things like “alexa ask …” and not “alexa set … to …”
and in the list i dont see switch, input_boolean, input_number, input_select, etc.
That is not true! You’re thinking of the conversational Skills Kit functionality, but this would be utilizing the Smart Home Skill API, which is what allows for controlling of home automation devices without needing to invoke the skill name.
As for setting input_numbers and whatnot, you should comment with that suggestion 
i didnt know that it was already possible to use/create any skill that uses the default things like turn on without calling the skill. untill a while ago that was only possible for some afeliated skills and even the skills from a lot of other products with a smart home skill still have you calling the skill.
but i will see what comes
feel free to suggest anything
i have already every option that i need so i dont need a new skill.
and what i dont have i can create with my appdaemon skill or with routines.
i dont expect new possibilities only an other way to programm them.
Check Alexa related news feeds from about six months ago when Amazon launched the smart home skills api it was very big news!
The Harmony skill was a major benefactor, instead of all the ”alexa, ask harmony to…” cobblers and using ”turn on…” where it isn’t really appropriate you can now say things like Alexa, change channel to BBC1. Ironically, it allowed me to ditch a lot of HA/Harmony controls I created in HA to get around that.
I think this has the potential to really put HA on the map as it will appeal to a lot more potential users.