Approaches to room aware voice commands for Alexa with Node-Red

[obaldius]

I found a way to get this working with the sentences: “Set the fan to high”, “Set fan to level medium”, “turn on fan to low”, “Turn fan to 1”, “set the fan to 2”, “Turn fan to level 3”, “Turn fan on to level 2”, “turn the fan on to 1”, “Put fan at 3” etc etc etc… 1 low, 2 medium, 3 high. It should also allow saying set to minimun, maximum, middle, low, medium, high, 1, 2, 3, spelling level or not… pretty flexible I believe, let me know please, I can’t test it out in english.

Alexa won’t complain, at least in Spanish, and you can set colours, white temperatures, increse/drecrease and set%'s of brightness/speed and turn on/off of course

Catch the first section from here:

Node Red Room aware Alexa voice commands

[image] This is an example with lights. This way you will just have to say ‘Turn the light on’ (or whichever sentence Alexa understands to turn a light on) and the appropriate light will turn on depending on the area you are in. That applies to any device: fans, tvs, curtains, ‘the mirror’ and so on… just one word for them all and no need to create a dozen routines to cover all kinds of requests. you will need: node-red-contrib-alexa-remote2 First section, ‘Setting currently listening device…

Get the Fan example from here:

Node Red Room aware Alexa voice commands

@mboarman Before trying this. Move all sections to the same flow and change ‘global’ to ‘flow’, the opposite of what you had to do the last time. It’s makes it easier for me to go on. Regarding the NR flow, read the full post before starting to do anything: If you want to use only the voice as a trigger: [image] [{"id":"d24786c2.2b4078","type":"ha-wait-until","z":"7fd466a.0d41e98","name":"","server":"9405c3fe.d0a6c","outputs":2,"entityId":"input_boolean.room_aware","entityIdFilterType":"exa…

[123 (Taras)]

@obaldius

I found a way to get this working with the sentences: “Set the fan to high”

FWIW, this ability was described several posts ago. A function node converts text to numbers. For example, the ‘twenty-five’ in the command ‘Set light to twenty five’ is converted to 25. It uses a map so it’s trivial to add other phrases like high, medium, low or pretty much anything like super bright, extra dim, night time, etc.

Within the received phrase, Alexa reports the brightness level using words , not numbers. The first function node (“Parse”) converts the words to numbers (because the command to set a light’s level requires a numeric value). The conversion is performed using a map. It’s possible to enhance the map by adding words like “low”, “medium”, and “high”, or even “night time”, with corresponding numeric values. Otherwise, there’s no need for the end-user to change anything within the first function node.

[obaldius]

oh ok sorry, every time I come across a function node I just don’t read it

[obaldius]

and when you say, set the light night time, doesn’t alexa complain? Isn’t there any situation where alexa complains?

[mboarman (Mark Boarman)]

Been playing around with this flow as well as another one in hope of creating a room aware echo setup…While setting this up I ran into a snag while trying to set my Fan percentage levels in their respective nodes. I use a Homeseer FC200+ switch and although the Alexa app shows the 4 stages of power levels:
off
1
2
3
NR won’t let me add a percentage?! Any thoughts?

[quadhammer]

@randytsuch

I’m also trying to figure out what to do if I say “turn on light” and two dots hear it. I have dots in connected rooms so sometimes the one in the other room responds.

https://imgur.com/a/yoV08pB is how I approach it. I also have two Alexa accounts combined, but because they share the same household, it ends up in duplicate messages, unless you use something like dropping a message.

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[obaldius]

@zkniebel

Eliminating the “[device] doesn’t do that” messages for commands hue devices don’t support
You can actually eliminate these messages pretty easily by creating routines in your Alexa App that don’t actually do anything. The routines won’t prevent your room-aware routines from being called. However, it may be more work than you’d like to create all of the routines in the Alexa App to match your room-aware routines. For example, I use a the following regex to match the command to set a fan to medium speed:

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(set|turn) (the )?fan ((on|to) )?medium

Regarding this, have you tried creating two HUE devices called “Fan to medium” and “Fan on medium”? I believe Alexa would take care of the rest… articles or not, whichever verb… As you said, even one device called “Fan medium” would do it. It might work, I can’t test it out though

[quadhammer]

@obaldius

Regarding this, have you tried creating two HUE devices called “Fan to medium” and “Fan on medium”? I believe Alexa would take care of the rest… articles or not, whichever verb… As you said, even one device called “Fan medium” would do it. It might work, I can’t test it out though

As I said here: Approaches to room aware voice commands for Alexa with Node-Red if you use a different skill to emulate the fan properly, you don’t need to mess around with fake routines to avoid the error messages.

[obaldius]

Didn’t read that, sorry

[123 (Taras)]

@obaldius

every time I come across a function node I just don’t read it

I have a similar reaction when I see a flow with many duplicated nodes.

The reason I used function nodes is because it allows me to do more with less. Those five nodes handle 8 devices (4 lights and 4 fans) in 4 rooms. It supports brightness commands as well as custom phrases and can easily handle more devices.

@obaldius

when you say, set the light night time, doesn’t alexa complain?

Without question, Alexa will complain if the phrase contains words it doesn’t support. For example, ‘Set light to medium’ isn’t understood and will result in a reply along the lines of “I don’t know how to do that.”

The solution is explained in the first post:

@zkniebel

Eliminating the “[device] doesn’t do that” messages for commands hue devices don’t support

You can actually eliminate these messages pretty easily by creating routines in your Alexa App that don’t actually do anything. The routines won’t prevent your room-aware routines from being called.

I have created a routine that responds “OK” when it hears the phrase “Set light to medium”. In addition, I added a key to the dictionary in the Parse node to identify medium as a value of 50:

That’s all there is to it. Now when I say “Alexa, set light to medium”, in any of the 4 rooms, Alexa responds “OK” and the light in that room is set to 50% brightness.

[obaldius]

Yeah, don’t get me wrong, I don’t read function nodes because I don’t still understand them. Hopefully someday I’ll be able to use them. Good job you all did here.