Alexa integration is oddly broken, ghost devices, etc

Out of the blue, my alexa integration partially stopped working. Light switches it would still control, but some of the other sensors and such wouldn’t work. Alexa just kept saying it couldn’t find any smart home devices that match the name. I have 30+ zwave devices that I’ve had exposed for 3+ years without issue. Nothing changed.

The weird thing is, everything works if I type prompts into alexa.amazon.com. But if I type the same prompt into the alexa app on my phone or speak to any of the echo devices, it says it can’t find the devices. This is what makes absolutely no sense to me. So the alexa service very much can talk to the entities, and is connected. But it’s different for my echo devices and my phone, which can see the devices in the devices lists, but can’t interact with them and when asked say the devices don’t exist. Essentially, the alexa website works, but nothing else does.

My plan was to just fully delete all the devices, disable/unlink the skill, and then start over, but that’s where everything is seemingly broken beyond repair. I see all my old devices in the devices tab in the alexa app, but if I click on them it just reloads the page. They’re there…and some of them alexa can control, others it says they don’t exist. I can’t click on them to remove/delete them. I tried disabling/unlinking the skill and reinstalling the alexa app to see if that would force them to go away, but it didn’t. I’ve tried unlinking the skill, then re-initating discovery, to see if that would force it to rescan things, but it just says it can’t find anything.

When I re-link the skill, it gives me a list of all the devices that are already connected. They all show as online, but I can’t do anything with that list.

At this point I don’t know what to do. I can’t even “start over” since I can’t delete things to actually start over. The integration works, because it is able to control some of the devices and I don’t see any errors in CloudWatch for my Lambda functions.

This thread is full of other folks who have ghost devices they can’t remove: Amazon Digital and Device Forums - US. I can see the items on the devices tab, but under settings → device settings, none of my smart home devices are listed. Just the amazon devices (fire tv sticks / echos)

EDIT: I tried completely deleting the skill to see if that would force the devices to clear out but it didn’t make a difference. I created a whole new skill with a different name and re-linked it. Upon doing that, it says it found 42 new devices and for me to add them one by one. I click the button and it just blanks out and goes to the devices page. Then clicking on any of the devices there, it just blanks the screen. It seems as if the entire devices section of my amazon profile is hosed on the backend.

That pretty much describes the Alexa integration (AMP)…

Alexa integration is oddly broken

There are efforts going on to replace it, but the integration itself is generally broken.

Yea, but I don’t think it’s a problem on the HA side. It seems like device management for my amazon profile is essentially broken. Even clicking on a sonos device on the devices tab does the same thing.

I know this is the HA forums and not Alexa/Amazon, but was hoping someone else had seen this before and had any idea on how to essentially reset my smart home / devices under my account. otherwise it seems the only solution is to make a whole new amazon account.

There’s confusion in this thread IMO. @fnhanks it seems you’re talking about the alexa skill with nabucasa or Alexa Smart Home SKill, and @Sir_Goodenough is talking about the Alexa Media Player integration.

What are you using?

Nabu Casa?
Alexa Smart Home Skill?
Alexa Media Player?

Nabu Casa and Alexa Smart Home Skill are mutually exclusive, however you can combine Alexa Media Player with NC & ASHS.

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I’m talking about the Alexa Smart Home Skill, which allows me to expose all my zwave devices to alexa.

However, the problem isn’t exclusive to the HA integration with Alexa. Seemingly every device under my profile is broken. It’s as if my entire devices profile for my amazon account is broken in some fashion for echo devices and the iOS app…but not the alexa.amazon.com site.

It’s continuing to become a bigger problem. For example, my kid said the ring disarm code wrong too many times this morning, and so Alexa disabled the voice integration. But now I can’t turn it back on, since I can’t actually click the ring device in the devices tab, as it just refreshes the page. So no way to turn on the voice integration again, since I can’t access device settings. The whole thing is completely broken. I know it’s an Alexa problem, so I’m very much not pointing the finger at HA here. Just trying to see if other folks in the community have seen this before or had other ideas. It very much seems server side and completely out of my control.

Hi, so I never got this notification because you replied to the thread instead of replying to the responder and I’m just noticing it now.

I personally haven’t seen issues like that. Then again, I only link alexa to HA. I’ve also since then moved away from alexa smart home skill and moved to nabu casa (which generally works better).

I’d wager there’s likely an issue with your alexa account on your devices. The only thing that pops into my head is a person logged into your devices (family member) that isn’t attached to your account and the devices are now getting confused. I’m not even sure that’s possible, but that’s something to consider.

My parents have alexa set up with multiple different devices (including HA), I routinely need to make adjustments to all of their skills to get things working again.