Amazon Alexa Smarthome Skill: Exposes non-metadata items

Apps & Services Amazon Alexa
1

I switched to openHAB3 now, and while letting Alexa scan for my already “ready” items, which I provided metadata for, I also noticed, that Alexa did also find some items, which do not contain alexa-metadata at all. How do they go into Alexa?

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The first three don’t have anything to do with Alexa, as it’s some Color-switch for my Xiaomi Gateway and the (beta) Balboa-Binding for my whirlpool.
From the green ones, I only added the “Gasheizung” switch via Metadata, the “Küche” is an echo and “Gosund 6” is a smart plug, which I control via Alexa, so that makes sense, those two are found.

But how will Alexa find those, which definetely don’t have metadata at all?
Is it, because the binding flags them as “lighting”?

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The Alexa skill still supports v2 tags. Although, this will be deprecated at some point in the near future. So, your assessment is correct.

At the moment, if you want to prevent the skill from making such item configuration as Alexa-enabled, you would need to use this workaround.

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Thank Jeremy,
for those, who like me switched to GUI-only configuration:

  1. open the item, you don’t want in Alexa, but is Tagged (lighting, colortemperature, …)
  2. click “Add-Metadata” - “Alexa” to add something
  3. switch to “Code”
  4. fill out disable as value:
value: "disable"
config: {}

delete all devices in the Alexa App (or Web-App), and let Alexa search again. It shouldn’t be on the list anymore.

2 Likes
4

Thanks for sharing. Just stumbled across this as well. It would be nice to have some switch somewhere to disable v2 tag support in general and so not accidentally expose “all” items I add - If I forget to explicitly disable it for Alexa.

5

Support for v2 tag has been removed from the upcoming skill changes for all OH3 users to prevent conflicts with the semantic classification. Once released, you will no longer have to use the workaround I mentioned above. Feel free to join the beta test if you want a head start :smiley:

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6

That is great news, thanks! Let me have a look what needs to done for the beta test… :slight_smile: