Alexa integration and entities control

ciciban · March 13, 2022, 3:29am

Hi all,

I have followed Alexa smart home integration tutorial here Amazon Alexa Smart Home Skill - Home Assistant and got all setup successfully including the Alexa App HomeAssistant skill linking

I have the AWS Lambda function working and I can see my HomeAssistant entities, like sensor.living_room_temperature (attached to an esp8266 multisensor in ESPHome integration) exposed when I run the test. However, when I ask my echo-dot “Alexa, what is the living room temperature” it replies with “Living room doesn’t support that”. Am I asking a wrong question or in a wrong way or have I done something wrong? I have the echo-dot btw as an Alexa device in the Living room group in the app, maybe that is messing something up?

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

ciciban · March 13, 2022, 3:55am

Hmmm, ok replying to myself seems I need Proactive Events enabled for Sensor type entities as mentioned here Amazon Alexa Smart Home Skill - Home Assistant

But seems my main problem is that no devices are being discovered by Alexa App after enabling the HomeAssistant Skill.

w35l3y · March 13, 2022, 8:02am

What locale have you defined in the configuration?

Try:

Remove locale
Remove the devices discovered by Alexa
Restart HA
Ask Alexa to discover devices

ciciban · March 13, 2022, 8:20am

Thanks for your reply @w35l3y . I have en-AU set in HA config (after trying diff options) but it is same problem without any as well. The language is English (AU) in the developer console for the Alexa skill and have the Lambda function created in AWS eu-west-2 Oregon region as per the guide since I’m located in Australia.

However, I can not shake off the feeling that something is not right in terms of language/region/location linking in my case. I had to use https://pitangui.amazon.com/ for the Client ID in the Account Linking setup in the developer console since the recommended https://alexa.amazon.co.jp/ for far east did not work – I was getting “Invalid client id or redirection uri” error. With that Client ID I can connect teh Alexa app on my phone with my Home Assistant but no devices get discovered.

w35l3y · March 13, 2022, 9:29am

You should be OK with en-AU.
Default locale when undefined is en-US.

I had this problem because I was using pt-BR.
Then I removed locale and everything is working fine.

github.com

home-assistant/core/blob/3a09090a4b6e2508595500f193cd8107c7f38bf0/homeassistant/components/alexa/entities.py#L718

    
      
          
          
    def default_display_categories(self):
                  """Return the display categories for this entity."""
                  # although there are other kinds of sensors, all but temperature
                  # sensors are currently ignored.
                  return [DisplayCategory.TEMPERATURE_SENSOR]
          
          
    def interfaces(self):
                  """Yield the supported interfaces."""
                  attrs = self.entity.attributes
                  if attrs.get(ATTR_UNIT_OF_MEASUREMENT) in (TEMP_FAHRENHEIT, TEMP_CELSIUS):
                      yield AlexaTemperatureSensor(self.hass, self.entity)
                      yield AlexaEndpointHealth(self.hass, self.entity)
                      yield Alexa(self.hass)
          
          

          
@ENTITY_ADAPTERS.register(binary_sensor.DOMAIN)
          class BinarySensorCapabilities(AlexaEntity):
              """Class to represent BinarySensor capabilities."""
          
          
    TYPE_CONTACT = "contact"

What is the unit of measurement of the sensor?

It seems the sensor capabilities are only exposed when unit of measurement is Fahrenheit or Celsius.

Post your configuration so we can be more accurate and don’t need to presume anything.

ciciban · March 13, 2022, 9:44am

Ok, problem solved. I had to transfer my echo-dot devices form my main amazon.com account where they got registered by default into my amazon.com.au account and now everything is working. And now I can also use https://alexa.amazon.co.jp/ as Client ID in the Alexa skill setup as described in the guide for Australia.

Thanks for all your help.

noiwid · September 16, 2022, 12:47pm

Hi,
I can’t find how to transfert my echo devices from amazon.com to amazon.fr, can you give me advices on how-to, or where to ?

Thanks a lot for your feedback.

Tismo · December 7, 2022, 5:39pm

Where would I find “locale”?!