Native Alexa scene support from Amazon

Configuration
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It seems that Amazon now has scene support:

> Today we are happy to announce the support for scenes, a new feature in Alexa skills developed with the Smart Home Skill API. With scenes, customers can issue a single voice command to an Alexa-enabled device such as the Amazon Echo or Echo Dot to set a predefined configuration of one or more devices to a desired state. For example, a customer could say, “Alexa, turn on bedtime” resulting with specific lights turning off, a bedroom light changing color to a low-lit orange-hue, a ceiling fan turned on, and the temperature changed to an ideal setting for sleep.

As I don’t own a Echo yet (but will get mine next week) I can’t judge in which this is super helpfull but curious to hear your opinions.

3 Likes
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I own (2) of them and I’m really excited to see this feature. I’d love to know what will be involved in getting Alexa to recognize HA scenes?

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Unless I am mistaken (haven’t tried it) this is already possible with Hue Emulation …

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Using Haaska you could utter “Alexa, activate [scene name] scene.” and you were off and running. Interested to see the impact on utterance update/changes and handling of scenes now that Echo is jumping into this end of the pool.

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Any update on this? Currently I use the emulated hue method but I have to say “Alexa, turn on goodnight”. It’s not a big deal but for family members, it would be easier for them to say “Alexa, goodnight”. Is this something that could be done eventually? Or would I have to use the more complicated build my own skill method?

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I don’t think that this syntax will be possible. The syntax will still be “turn on”. When you set up the Alexa component, it actually gets a bit wordier, but more conversational. Like, I use “Alexa, ask Home Assistant to wake up Nora” and the lights go on in her room. So you’re saddled with “Alexa, ask [name you choose] …”

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You’re right! I guess I’ll stick with my current setup. Thanks

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I am tying to do this but cant get it to work. I have the scenes set up and an automation to turn them on at certain times but can’t get it to work with the echo. How did you configure this?

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Here’s what I did. Note: I did not expose everything by default, just used the customize area for the scene I have called “scene.goodnight”

emulated_hue:
  host_ip: your_IP_address
  listen_port: 8300
  off_maps_to_on_domains:
    - script
    - scene
  expose_by_default: false

Then add this to your customize section:

customize:
  scene.goodnight:
    emulated_hue: true
    emulated_hue_name: "Goodnight"
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10

Thanks for the help that worked. The only problem I am having is after I say “Alexa, turn on goodnight” it will turn on goodnight and then say “the device is not responding and I should check the network connection and power supply” but it did work. Am I missing something?

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I think is solved in next release

1 Like