I use Open Hub and Alexa Skills. This actually works, but only partially.
Alexa recognizes many of my items incorrectly.
For example, I have items for office roller blinds, office light and office temperature.
Now when I ask Alexa “what is the temperature in the office” she replies with “office roller blinds don’t support that”. So the wrong device is being addressed.
I’ve already found out that it works if I name the items completely differently. If I rename the temperature item E.g. to “Temperature Basement”, Alexa answers me with the correct temperature.
However, that doesn’t help me. I have to make sure that Alexa can distinguish the items even if they all have “office” in the name. How do you do that? This problem appears to all my rooms, beacause I have similar items in every room.
Alexa and Google struggle with similar names, particularly in non-English languages. When I try to turn on the “air fryer”, Google sometimes turns on the “air conditioner”. I’m guessing that they put a lot of weight on the first word in order to react faster. When you think about it, humans do the same thing when we respond before someone has finished asking us a question.
As you note, the solution is to make it easier for the voice assistants through your naming conventions. That’s not really a satisfying solution, but it’s a necessity given the current level of sophistication in their AIs (or lack thereof).
You can also set up shortcuts for voice commands that are particularly troublesome. I recently discovered that Google will sometimes hear “air fryer” as “apartment”…and proceed to turn everything on or off. So I set up a shortcut for “turn on the apartment” that always just turns on the air fryer.
What happen when you ask “what is the office temperature”? I am asking because you usually want to use the exact name to identify a specific device. Using prepositions may not always result in expected behavior. Hopefully the next generation of Alexa will be better at understanding such requests.
Nevertheless, one thing you could do is to create a group named “Office” on the Alexa side and add your temperature sensor device to it along with other device related to that location. Doing so should help having your initial temperature request understood.
