Question: I have integrations for my various smart devices in HA. Skills for these same devices are active with in Alexa. This means that I am getting duplicate devices when Alexa runs discovery.
Am I better off implicitly excluding the HA version of devices from Alexa or turning off the skills in Alexa and only using the devices seen via HA?
I’d look at it on a device / integration by integration basis.
Instead. What is the most direct path between endpoints? How many hops?
For instance let’s say you had SmartThings integration with Both Alexa and HA. And it provided access to a lamp. When you tell Alexa to ‘turn on my lamp’ what is the path that request takes.
If you disable the SmartThings skill then the path is Alexa > HA > SmartThings > lamp.
Instead if you either disable or otherwise mask the HA version of the lamp and use the ST skill the path is instead:
Alexa > SmartThings > lamp.
So look at each integration and determine possible paths and ‘least hops’ and that usually determines the answer to your question.