Hello,
I’ve signed up for HA Cloud to link to my Alexa devices for voice control. Everything seems to be connected correctly, however Alexa won’t control any devices? If I ask to turn on or off lights, or scenes, she simply says the Device is not responding.
Even within the Alexa app on iOS, it says Device is unresponsive. Any help would be appreciated!
I see the same grey message unresponsive message in the Alex app. Alexa will still perform the actions but It’s been bugging me since the cloud beta days.
Try the following:
After the latest update (106.5), I get something similar but probably not the same:
I have multiple universal media players setup for my Onkyo Zone 2, and although they are not marked as « Unresponsive » in the Alexa app, Alexa verbally complains they are unresponsive but still Powers them ON when I ask her to. Asking to Power off does not produce the complaint.
I tried to remove devices, Disable, reboot, Enable, rediscover wihout improvements.
I rolled back to 105.5 and it works correctly now. Not sure where to report this.
Since upgrading to .106 I also experience slow Alexa device responses and the grey bar in the Alexa app saying the device is unresponsive or Alexa voice responses that say “the device isn’t responding”. In most cases, the device or scene is activated after a while. Using the HA cloud integration.
Is anyone else still having this problem? I recall getting the “the device is not responding” issue a few times in past but it has been happening a lot more recently.
The Home Assistant Cloud and Alexa integration seems to be unresponsive regularly. Sometimes, Alexa says the device isn’t responding but the action still goes through and other times nothing happens and I need to repeat the command (it always works the second time).
It almost feels like the Home Assistant Cloud commands are ran as AWS Lambda or Google Cloud functions that timeout.
I get this all the time, but haven’t tried to dig into what is going on yet. Most of the time when Alexa says the device is not responsive it actually did work.
I experience that as well. I’d say about 60/40 - 60% of the time when Alexa says the device isn’t responding the command still goes through. It seems like a timeout response issue.
Same here. There also seems to be a correlation with the time elapsed since the device was last referenced in a voice command: devices that have been used recently time out much less frequently.
This makes me speculate if Home Assistant Cloud is using something like Google Functions, Google App Engine (standard env), or AWS Lambda to run their servers.
The randomness of the issue feels like a “cold start penalty” that is common with a lot of serverless deploys that are configured to prioritize cost over performance.
I have been experiencing the same. For $60/year, I’d expect higher reliability.
Same problem for me. Its a shame, I just subscribed to the service too. Devices respond fine in the home assistant dashboard but intermitently the alexa integration has the trouble.
My use case is that I have a smart kettle (tasmota) connected through MQTT to home assistant. The kettle nearly always >90% starts but I’d say 60% of the time alexa will say the device is not responding afterward
This is also a significant issue for me. Sometimes devices are reported as not responding but still work and other times just fail. As others have mentioned is frustratingly inconsistent to the point of being annoying.
Nabu Casa (and by implication, Home Assistant) need to resolve this before its becomes recognised as default behaviour. Perhaps extending a timer somewhere in the short term would alleviate the issue whilst long term solutions are identified.
Same issue here. Made another post a few days ago, but now see this one. Definitely feels so much like something “going to sleep” in HA and the first command wakes it for a period.
I might test this with a timed routine issuing a random HA command every 20 minutes or to see if this keeps things “awake”.
I’m finding this also.
It seems to have gotten worse since the “System Upgrade” that happened a few days ago for me.
I’d say you can hit Alexa with a command, it fails, you hit it again it works, then a few more commands later and it fails again.
As others are reporting, it also says it’s unable to do it, then it actually does do it.
Slightly frustrating!
Shunts…
I’m seeing this as well. I set up a custom smart home skill following the docs here and it’s super fast and always works. So something is going on with the cloud hosted skill. Would be great to figure out what’s going on so it can get fixed.
I can also confirm this issue here. Devices are reported as unresponsive but the action does come through.
I noticed this problem occurs only with Scenes for me. This is logical: HA passes scenes as a light to Alexa (and Homekit), these can be turned on like a light, but they don’t have a real state, so Alexa doesn’t get the respond it needs.
Another thing that people comment on when having unresponsive devices is looking at your router settings:
Disable IGMP Snooping and Multicast Enhancement if you have them. That did the trick for me in case of homekit bridge (where I also had unresponsiveness issues).
This happens to me as well. I’ve emailed Nabu Casa a few times and they haven’t bothered to respond. This is a core requirement for me, I’m seriously considering moving back to Hubitat.
