Alexa question --> Read out boolean status of lamps & switches?

[jeshab (Jeremy)]

@bahmrockk

What I’m confused about is the fact that in the Alexa companion app, the light is shown as “off” or “on”.
I tried adding the ReportState in addition to the lighting but still no change in behaviour. The app tells me the state of the switch, Alexa, when asked, tells me “how should I know?”, exaggerated

So this is a limitation on the Alexa side with the PowerController interface. Only Amazon would be able to answer the reason for it.

As you noticed, you can get the status of a PowerController modeled item via the Alexa App but you can’t get that same status when requesting via voice commands. This is because the skill only gets ReportState requests for the former but not for the latter.

I know it’s pretty frustrating but if this is a feature you must have, you could use a workaround via the toggleController interface. Keep in mind that you will need to use the component friendly name to control the device and the Alexa app integration wouldn’t have a nice bulb icon to turn on and off.

Switch Floor_Light "floorlight %s" <light> ["Lighting"] { channel="knx:device:e5f3fe24:A", alexa="ToggleComponent" [category="LIGHT", friendlyNames="Power"] }

Alexa, turn on floor light power
Alexa, what’s the status of floor light?
Alexa, is floor light on?