I am unable to rename any of my devices. I initially name my devices with the room name in it, like “Family Room - Lamp” and put it in area Family Room. Now trying to get voice assistant working with the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition (Voice PE). Seems to be having trouble with the “-”. I say “Hey Jarvis (ping), turn on the family room lamp” it says it doens’t have a device by that name. I added a new device just called “test” in area family room. I say “Hey Jarvis (ping), turn on family room test lamp” and it works. I’m trying to rename the devices to make them less complicated and remove the “-”. But, after clicking on
Submit, the names don’t change.
There have been changes in the entity naming scheme a couple of months ago where HA adds areas to entity ids. The HA team wants everyone of us to name things in a way that the area isn’t clear, and then prepends the area in the entity id to make it clear. For me, this isn’t how I name things most of the time, but they seem to know better.
I would not be surprised if this change messes with you in voice commands. That would explain why the name test (without area) works and the name that includes the area does not. With that you might need to name the area twice?
To prevent problems with devices/entities they probably also try to do some stuff to split area names from the name in existing devices/entities, that might mess with the renaming.
These changes to the naming schemes were tried before, got a lot of negative feedback during beta testing back then, and were rolled back because of it. But the changes were sneaked back in some time ago without naming them in release notes, hoping no one would notice. Well, I guess you just did.
Since they kept us in the dark about what they did exactly, we can only guess. I just know I needed to do a lot of renaming on new things after the change. I’m not about to change how I name things because they want me to, so I resigned to rename a lot of the new things I add.
I also noticed a lot of entity renaming recently. I had to go in and manually override a bunch of entities. Apparently my time isn’t valuable enough to not make me spend more time than necessary to name things the way I want.
Obviously I can glean what the entity is related to by the entity id or the device column.
But I really don’t like the device and area columns as it takes up way too much space for the small benefit they give. well before the recent naming fiasco but now I guess I
m stuck with it.
and by looking at the names there I have no idea at all if they’ve been properly renamed or not. which forces me to click on every one of them and go to the entity settings to see what the real name of the entity is. Many of them aren’t named correctly to my naming convention and I didn’t notice until I added them to a dashboard card and the name showed up as some unwieldy monstrosity that required me to go and manually edit the name.
Definitely use an alias as JC said. You are not going to win the ridiculous battle of the backend naming convention.
I use a lot of names like Mary, Bob, George so that they are easy to recognize in voice for my aliases, but in general we still control the aliases, so use them instead of the backend names with the area and all the dashes and dots..
What pisses me of the most, is that i had(have) an “funny” idea of always use as short names as possible (old habit, as a bit is still a bit, and a byte a Byte)
With the help from some genius now there will often be +twice as much writes and reads on my HA-Green buildin Card , and my DB etc. HTF are they thinking ?
We are at the ‘Join the dev team and add to the arch discussion’ or the ‘Hang on for the ride’ level here.
At the speed things change, best pick your battles.
… Ride the wave …
Not a great solution, but, I renamed a couple of devices. They did not show up with new names, but, after a HA restart, they did. New names seem to have been updated as automation are still working.
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