I have been running HA for probably two years now and in that time my home has acquired more and more smart devices. I’m doing so I’ve noticed a degrading affect with HA and Alexa. There are countless duplicate items learned either in HA or Alexa and they introduce them to the other.
My question is which should be the “athuority” on all devices. Should it be Alexa knowing everything and HA learns them from it or the inverse where HA learns everything and Alexa learns it from HA.
In case anyone comes across this “thread” looking for a similar answer…Here’s what I did that seems to work well.
I removed most of the Smart Skills from Amazon. I used Home Assistant as the authority device. If there was something I had that HA couldn’t handle then I would use Amazon Smartskill to handle it.
By using this methodology I could have Alexa rediscovery devices all the time and it will not find duplicates. HA passes through (controlled under the cloud integration) all the devices I want it to pass and everything seems to be nice and clean now.