Can Alexa be aware of where she is?

Configuration Voice Assistant
1

Hello there,

I’ve an Alexa product in almost every important part of my house.
I’d like to be able to enter a room and say something like “Alexa, on the light” or “Alexa close the shutter”

But it means that the Alexa device that hears me the most (could be more than one …) should understand “of the room where you are”.

I tried grouping in the Alexa app but it is not working very well. When I say “Close the shutter”, it might off the light, tell me that there is no device to close or say something like “which parameter do you want to change?”, it is weird.

Do you know what could be done, maybe with the intents? (I’ve no experience with that, I don’t even know if it is what I believe it is, lol)

Thank you.

2

Right now if you are asking alexa to calculate responses you’re limited to what you can do - but… Alexa Media Player can help:

It has a sensor called ‘last called’
Using Alexa Media Player “last called” service - Configuration - Home Assistant Community (home-assistant.io)

Coupled with notifications you can act on where the last ask was.

It also supports the personalization features is you’ve enabled it and can tell you who answered in the response.

3

Lucky me, I’ve Alexa Media Player configured :slight_smile:
I’ll give it a try. I know what to do this week-end!

1 Like
4

Wanna get freaky?

When you’re done lookup Alexa Actionable Notifications (designed to work on concert with this)

You want to have a conversation with Alexa?

You should have seen my wife’s face the first time I had a back and forth convo with Madame A.

5

It’s been a while, but I experimented with using the “last_called” sensor from Alexa Media Player for room-aware automations in the past. Even then, when “last_called” was more reliable than it has been lately, I found using room-based device groups in the Alexa app to be more reliable.

6

I want to be in a house like Sarah in Eureka.

2 Likes
7

There’s indeed been a lot of traffic around it recently, Drew. including not even two weeks something changed in the api and an update was required to get her working again.

8

This can do it. But you’ll have to put in the work.

Once you figure out the framework of how a conversation works (takes a bit you have to think in chunks) you can so some really cool stuff.

Im working on a morning routine right now that runs through various things I need triggered off coffee (yeah it’s a riff on the coffee automation everyone always uses as a demo. In this case coffee is trigger not result)

‘good morning Nathan, I see you’re making coffee, some batteries are showing dead. Would you like the home report before your brief?’

No

‘fine then, I didn’t want to tell you anyway.in any case it’s foggy this morning so…’

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9

By the way, I noticed that it can take days (up to 10) for a script to show in the Alexa app.

Do you know what I do wrong? Or what I can do to force the sync?

10

It’s possible to do Room Aware in Node Red also using this:

Unfortunately, it’s glitchy right now and not working 100% but developers are working hard to fix.

Alexa Groups was never an option to me because I want to control ceiling fans with Room Aware.

11

You should be able to ask Alexa to “scan for new devices”. That is definitely the way to get entities other than scripts to be recognized, so I suspect it works for scripts also.

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12

It does. It just tells the system to refresh

13

:cry: such a failure.

It is “kind of working”, but it takes so long for the last_called to be updated that most of the time the action occurs in the wrong room.

I’ve added a wait in the script but it is better and worst at the same time.

  - wait_template: >-
      {{ ( now()|as_timestamp() - states['sensor.last_alexa'].last_updated|default(0,true)|as_timestamp()|default(0,true))  < 5 }}
    continue_on_timeout: true
    enabled: false

It is waiting for the sensor to change, which is good when you’re in another room.
But if you are in the same room, it will wait forever.
If I put a timeout, I’m back at the “wrong room” issue.

I’ll never have my EUReKA Sarah :frowning: