No aliases for things exposed to Alexa but could we have an alternative name?

Feature Requests
1

I’m envious of Google Home users in one area: things exposed to Google Home can be given aliases.

Whilst the inability to use aliases with Alexa is a shortcoming of Alexa and not HA, I wonder if a compromise could be achieved?

The way I name things in HA is usually intended to help with organising things in HA. For example, all my things have names that start with an area and then continue with a device and then perhaps some sub-device. An example would be ‘Lounge Table Light Left’.

I would like to be able to specify the name that gets exposed to Alexa. Is this thoretically possible? An example is this: I have a number of scripts that cause my TV to tune to different program channels. These scripts are called:

  • Lounge TV BBC1
  • Lounge TV BBC News
  • Lounge TV Sky News
  • etc.

The nameing causes all the scripts to appear together in the list of scripts within HA.

However, I don’t want to have to say, ‘Alexa, turn on Lounge TV BBC 1,’ I just want to say, ‘Alexa, turn on BBC 1’.

It would be great if I could pass the ‘Lounge TV BBC1’ script to Alexa as just ‘BBC1’.

2

you can configure the “cloud:” integration to customize the name exposed to Alexa. I use it quite a bit.

But then again I configure my cloud integration via yaml so I’m not sure if that’s available to users who use the UI.

here is an example of my config:

cloud:
  alexa:
    filter:
      exclude_domains:
        - group
        - camera
        - automation
        - sensor
        - binary_sensor
        - alert
       
    entity_config:
      input_boolean.lc_front_porch_light_automation_master:
        name: Porch Light Automations
      input_boolean.tank_cleaning:
        name: Tank Cleaning Mode
      input_boolean.north_gd_announce_enabled:
        name: Garage Door Announcements
      light.mbr_lamp:
        name: Master Bedroom Lamp
      light.wled_fireplace:
        name: Fireplace Lights
      light.wled_kitchen_appliance_cabinet:
        name: Appliance Light
1 Like
3

Thanks @finity , I’ll take a look.

4

Sorry @finity , do you know where in the documentation I can find an explanation of the configuration you have given an example of?

5
1 Like
6

Just to mention - for anyone else interested in this - you can change the name of a thing in the Alexa app.

I found this solution more acceptable as I wasn’t keen on moving away from the nice new UI (for managing entities exposed to voice assistants) to a yaml approach.

1 Like
7

I was coming here to say the same thing!

I have a lamp in Home Assistant called “Living Room Corner Lamp” for naming convention consistency but in Alexa, it is “Corner Lamp” for simplicity.

1 Like
8

I have recently switched to Alexa. And I am missing this feature. I also use assistant with multi-language so I need aliases. I have discovered the following:

  • You can add multiple names by having the devices with comma separated names, for instance in this last case, you could set the name as Living Room Corner Lamp, Corner Lamp

I am currently overriding the name of the entities with this approach, and besides the fact that it is a tedious task, it works quite well. Anyway, I would suggest having a configuration in the alexa configuration such as add_aliases_to_friendly_name which would have this function append to the entities, comma separated aliases to the friendly name.

I’ll probably try it out locally, but if anyone else finds it interesting and not a terrible workaround, I can setup a pull-request.