Grouped Hue lights not dimmable with Alexa

Configuration
1

Hi,

I have 2 Hue lightbulbs that are in a group called ‘living room’ The group itself works fine with Alexa for turning on and off by saying “Alexa, turn off the living room” I can also dim the grouped bulbs via the WebUI.

When I say “Alexa, dim the living room lights” She responds with “The device living room lights is not responding, please check its network connection and power supply”

When I view the API link I can see both bulbs show up as

“Hue white lamp 1”, “state”: {“bri”: 255, “on”: true, “reachable”: true}, “swversion”: “123”, “type”: “Dimmable light”
“Hue white lamp 2”, “state”: {“bri”: 255, “on”: true, “reachable”: true}, “swversion”: “123”, “type”: “Dimmable light”

and the group shows as:

“Living room”, “state”: {“bri”: 255, “on”: true, “reachable”: true}, “swversion”: “123”, “type”: “Dimmable light”

If I say “Alexa dim the Hue white lamp 1 to 20%” it works perfectly, it’s just the group itself that’s not working. Is there anything else I should be doing?

Thanks for any help.

2

I don’t believe that this involves HASS at all. HUE bulbs should be set up directly within Alexa. And groups are defined there as well.

3

There are two ways to use Hue lights with Alexa and Home Assistant…

  1. You can ask Alexa to “discover” your Hue lights. These then appear in your Alexa console at alexa.amazon.con where you can configure groups of lights too.
    Note, if you call a group “Living Room” you must use that when addressing Alexa. So to dim them, you should say “Alex, dim the living room by 50%” as an example. If you’d prefer to say “living room lights” you must call the group “living room lights” and not just “living room”.

  2. Expose groups/scripts/scenes/lights via the emulated hue plugin for Home Assistant. Using this plugin HASS can pretend to be a Hue Bridge that Alexa will talk to. Again, naming is quite important here. Don’t duplicate names of lights/groups already in use in the above config else you will run into problems. Pretty much most of the tasks you can get HASS to perform can be exposed and what is nice is each can have its emulated hue name configured. You can read more at https://home-assistant.io/components/emulated_hue/