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’.
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.