Is there a way to send or read any info wich echo has got the voice and is sending the request to hass?
For example, if i am in the living room i could just say, Alexa shut the lights off instead of Alexa shut the light in living room off.
Cheers
Not yet. The API does not yet distinguish which Echo received the response.
There is a little way around that I noticed my kids doing. My kids each have their own Amazon account and tied their Dot’s into their own accounts. So they can setup groups for whatever controls they like. I heard one of them saying the other day “Alexa, turn off my lights”. He had a group seutp called “my lights”. Now this falls apart if the units are close enough to hear each other easily. Then they will both try to respond and that might not be so good.
Right. But that’s not “getting around it” really. That’s separate Echos on separate accounts with separate configurations.
@ih8gates At one time, I actually reconfigured some of the code for Home Assistant’s Hue Bridge component (the component responsible for answering Alexa’s “turn on” commands) so that it would also send me the IP address of the requesting device. The results were shocking.
Echo devices communicate with each other, and round-robin which device makes the request! So, if I am in my bedroom, and ask “her” to turn off the lights, “she” says OK, but another echo dot will actually send the command. Sometimes it’s the kitchen dot, sometimes it’s the living room, sometimes the office, and sometimes it’s actually the bedroom. All in all, the way these devices intercommunicate and randomly choose the sending device makes it impossible without external sensors to determine where the request came from.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there it is.
Wow. That’s interesting. Thanks for the info.
You could use something like Bluetooth LE / Beacons to detect what room you were in. You would need to use custom alexa though and ask home assistant.
Note, not done it, but don’t see why it shouldn’t work with some scripting
It occurs to me that Alexa knows which dot you are talking to. She answers out of the one that heard you speaking, not all of them at once. There should be a way to get that information (now whether it’s in the API’s or not is another question).
Any updates on this?
I know this is an old topic but has the Alexa API been updated in the last three years to enable this type of info? It would be great to know which Alexa device is being sent the command to create context aware automatons.
Yes, there is a solution for that since long time.
Magic comes from last seen sensor for alexa
You need this sensor configured with your alexa devices and that’s it. I did it after this sensor was googled very easy. Now I can tell alexa „shut off the lights“ and alexa knows where I am and also where to shut off the lights