I got a Xiaomi temperature sensor in our garden.
I would like to get the measured temperature when asking Alexa “What’s the temperature outside?”, but she obviously replies with the weather info.
I did create a group in the Alexa app called Outside I put the item in, but that doesn’t do the trick.
A workaround would be to create a Garden group and ask for the Garden temperature, but that’s not too intuitive.
Is there maybe a way to tag the item in a way the sensor temperature is preferred to the weather info service?
I think you may have answered your own question, in my experience on using Alexa is that you need unique item names and phrases, like Garden temperature as you mentioned.
I had the similar problem. My sensor is in the carport and is named that way. I can ask Alexa: „what is the temperature of carport?“. I ask in German but it is also not grammatically correct in German. However it works
As you noticed Alexa native standard requests take precedence over skill requests. So as @matt_shepherd mentioned above, you will need to uniquely name your item. It doesn’t necessary need to be part of a group. You can simply name your device as “Garden Temperature”.
A workaround that should work but I haven’t tested is to use Alexa routines to accomplish what you need. Alexa routines in most cases take precedence over the other use cases.
In the Alexa routine you would create, it should have the utterance “What’s the temperature outside” as trigger and the utterance “What’s the garden temperature” as custom action. In the end you should be able to ask both utterances and get your temperature sensor state.
