How do I get Alexa to control all the lights in a room through HA?
A few days ago, I could control the living room lights by saying “Alexa, turn on the living room lights.” And both those lights would dutifully turn on. Same with the family room, the master bedroom, and the dining room.
Then the dining room and living room lights stopped being controlled by Alexa. The family room and the master bedroom both still work.
I had not made any changes in Home Assistant or in the Alexa app, other than applying the HA updates that HA alerts me about.
Both the dining room and living room can still be controlled by our Google hub just fine (“Ok Google, turn on the living room lights”). And the HA dashboard can turn on the lights directly by clicking the slider next to “Living Room” in the overview page. All the living room lights entities are exposed to Alexa in the voice assistant section of HA. And this used to work, as of a few days ago.
I say: “Alexa, turn on the living room lights”
She says: “Sorry, I didn’t find a group or device called living room”
The fact that the devices can be turned on with HA or Google Hub shows this isn’t a signal interference problem but rather a configuration or integration problem.
Home Assistant 2023.5.2
Supervisor 2023.04.1
Operating System 10.1
Frontend 20230503.3 - latest
I am now having this same issues intermittently. One of the affected devices is are my “Kitchen Lights”. After saying “Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights”, Alexa is repeating back the device name correctly, but responds… “Sorry, I didn’t find a group or device called living room”. Interestingly enough, if I say “kitchen lights on”, everything works correctly.
Were you able to identify a resolution to your problem? Everything had been working for weeks with no issue.
Nope… at least not for voice control. And like you, I get better luck if I change the order of the words. About six weeks ago I installed some Aqara light switches, the two-switches-in-one-gang, and have programmed them to do most of the light groups that we’d otherwise control by voice. Have the switches set to the decoupled mode, so not counting on the internal relay to control the lights, just using the logic of the switch itself. I like those switches as they look pretty minimalistic, have two switches in the space of one, are quiet, and it has single-press action for each button, double-press action, and single and double press actions when pushing both at the same time. I have the single-press actions configured for the most intuitive automation (the light closest to the switch), and double-press actions for things like all the lights in the room or some such thing.
As far as the voice problem, I don’t know. Maybe when I get done with a bunch of other work on the house, I can circle back to this. Maybe by then Amazon might have updated the Echo firmware to make that work more reliably.