Alexa doesn‘t update helper of type numbers anymore

Third party integrations
1

I‘m using Alexa to tell me my blood sugar value from my FreeStyle Libre 3 sensor.
As to my knowledge it‘s not possible to integrate a blood sugar sensor entity directly into Alexa. So I use a helper of type numbers to get this done.

Here is the definition that copies my blood sugar value from the sensor to the numbers helper:

IMG_0448
IMG_04481164×1433 98.8 KB

IMG_0449
IMG_0449977×1237 76.5 KB

And here‘s the definition in configuration.yaml how it is presented to Alexa:

alexa:
  smart_home:
    filter:
      include_entities:
        - number.zucker_von_manfred

The entire configuration was done following exactly the instructions of this documentation:
Amazon Alexa Smart Home Skill

Everything worked fine for about 10 months but within the last couple of weeks Alexa stopped updating the value. The value stays at the last known value forever.

But there‘s a workaround: If I ask Alexa to increase the value by 0 (zero) it pulls the actual value from Home Assistant. But a couple of weeks ago it automatically updated the value.

I‘m not sure whether the change that leads to this malfunction is on Home Assistant or on Alexa/Amazon side.

When I import the numbers helper freshly into Alexa app it teils me that the server is not responding (in German „Server reagiert nicht“) and shows value 0 what means that I should be dead :wink:

IMG_0450
IMG_04502387×473 47 KB

And if I ask Alexa to increase „Zucker von Manfred“ by zero it updates the value correctly and the error message is gone:

IMG_0451
IMG_04512387×475 38.3 KB

But it only updates the value once and I have to ask Alexa again to increase the device by 0 to get the next update.

Does anybody know what changed in Home Assistant and/or Alexa that stopped the automatic update of the value within the last couple of weeks? And how can I get the old automatic updating functionality back?

Should I report this as an incident in GitHub for HA core?

Please help if possible.

2

Salut ! J’ai eu un souci similaire avec l’intégration Alexa qui a arrêté de push les updates automatiquement après une mise à jour de HA :thinking: Chez moi c’était lié au proactive mode qui s’était désactivé tout seul. T’as vérifié dans ta config alexa si t’as bien endpoint: et client_id:/client_secret: configurés pour le proactive reporting ? Sinon essaie de forcer un resync complet en supprimant et réimportant le skill dans l’app Alexa, ça avait résolu mon problème.
N’hésite pas à consulter d’autres sites pour trouver des solutions. renove-ton-logement.fr parle par exemple de tout ce qui concerne l’habitation.

3

Hi John, I never had proactive mode configured since it‘s optional and automatic value update for my numbers helper worked without it. Do you think Alexa activated proactive mode on their side at the beginning of my configuration 10 months ago? As far as I know you have to define at least these properties in configuration.yaml to use proactive mode:

    endpoint: https://api.amazonalexa.com/v3/events
    client_id: YOUR_SKILL_CLIENT_ID
    client_secret: YOUR_SKILL_CLIENT_SECRET

So my question is if proactive mode can be activated in any way without the above mentioned properties?