Alexa responding "What setting" instead of setting light level

Apps & Services Amazon Alexa
1

I have two Alexa items set up as follows (about as simple as it gets!)

Dimmer AlexaBedroomLight  "Bedroom light" {alexa="Lighting"}
Dimmer AlexaTestLight     "Test light"    {alexa="Lighting"}

Asking Alexa to switch either of them on or off works fine.

Ask “Test light 50” and it works

Ask “Bedroom light 50” and Alexa responds “what setting?” No matter what you then say, it doesn’t recognise the setting you are asking for. The LastVoiceCommand event confirms Alexa is receiving the correct command in all cases.

I’ve deleted the item, removed it from Alexa and re-added, but still can’t get it to work.

I’m thinking there is a corrupted item stuck in a cache somehwere in Alexa, is there a way of forcing a flush of all devices?

What’s puzzling is it did work fine, I’ve made no changes to the item or in alexa, and it’s stopped working.

Jim

2

If you removed all your discovered devices on the Alexa end, it would no longer know them. I assume you have been triggering discovery requests whenever you made configuration changes.

Make sure to comment/remove all your Alexa configuration and stagger changes. I have seen couple times users realizing they were testing some Alexa configuration other items that they forgot about.

Also, check your groups on the Alexa side as well. Even an empty group could mess up the recognition since Alexa prioritizes group names over discovered device names.

3

I assume you have been triggering discovery requests whenever you made configuration changes.

Yes. Comment out in items file, save (confirm in log it’s picked up the file changes), delete items in Alexa, discovery request - nothing found. Add the bedroom light back into the items file, discovery finds it, doesn’t work. Add the test, works fine.

Also, check your groups on the Alexa side as well.

Only have one group in Alexa (Home), Echo devices are the room names (don’t know if that matters), but two rooms fail (Bedroom and Office), other two work fine.

Jim

4

Have you tried to ask differently such as set bedroom light to 50% or without the term “light”? Are requests to turn on or off that specific item failing as well?

5

Have you tried to ask differently such as set bedroom light to 50% or without the term “light”? Are requests to turn on or off that specific item failing as well?

Yes, that’s where it fails. On/OFF is fine, set a level (or any other instruction, such as FULL, INCREASE, DECREASE) and it fails.

Looking at it today with a fresh head, I’ve got to the bottom of the issue by the process of elimination, but don’t understand the interaction that’s occuring

There is a second item defined in the bedroom.

Dimmer          AlexaBedroomLight        "Bedroom light"          {alexa="Lighting"}
Rollershutter   AlexaBedroomCurtain      "Bedroom curtain"        {alexa="Blind"}

If just the dimmer is defined, it works OK. Add the RollerShutter and it fails. But they are different voice tags!

Another example that fails is

Dimmer         AlexaLoungeLight           "Lounge light"            {alexa="Lighting"}
Switch         AlexaLoungeFloorLamp       "Lounge floor"            {alexa="Switchable"}
Switch         AlexaLoungeTableLamp       "Lounge table"            {alexa="Switchable"}
Rollershutter  AlexaLoungeFrontCurtain    "Lounge front curtain"    {alexa="Blind"}
Rollershutter  AlexaLoungeRearCurtain     "Lounge rear curtain"     {alexa="Blind"}

Again, remove the RollerShutter items and it’s fine.

I suspect Alexa is performing some form of grouping in the tag name, but there’s no logic to it as switches would in theory also cause it to fail as they don’t accept percentages, but it’s just the RollerShutter that causes the fail.

Weird!!!

Jim

6

Can you control your rollershutter items, including semantic actions (e.g. open/close), with the dimmer items setup for Alexa?

7

Thaks for the tip. I’d tried to find out how to do this (change ON/OFF to OPEN/CLOSE) but no amount of searching found anything useful.

Now knowing they are called “semantic actions” enabled me to find the detail in 10 seconds and now have the curtains working as switiches (which is all I need).

THANKS!!! :slight_smile: :+1:

For reference, this was my final solution

Switch AlexaBedroomCurtain "Bedroom curtain" {alexa="ToggleController.toggleState" [category="DOOR", friendlyNames="@Setting.Opening", actionMappings="Close=OFF,Open=ON", stateMappings="Closed=OFF,Open=ON"]}

Jim

8

Are you saying switching to a ToggleController interface allowed you to control the light device in that same room the way you wanted?

On a side note, you should probably use the INTERIOR_BLIND category for your AlexaBedroomCurtain item.

9

Yes. All I needed for the curtains was open/close, so making it a toggle provides that, and also seems to get around the problem I was having with Alexa.

Thanks for the categroy tip, finally understand what that setting is :slight_smile:

Jim