Official Alexa Smart Home Skill for openHAB 2

In your rule are using “Item xxx changed” or “Item xxx received command” ? If you use the later you should be able to respond to the Off command regardless of it changing state.

Color was just added to the smarthome api on April 7th but is not yet supported in our app, see Support Color Lights · Issue #22 · openhab/openhab-alexa · GitHub

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Is it possible to ask Alexa for the current thermostat temperature? Looking at the source code, I’d guess it should. However, when I ask “What is the temperature in Wohnzimmer?”, Alexa replies with “The command doesn’t work for item ‘Wohnzimmer Thermostat’”.
Changing the temperature does work though.
Here are my items:

Group WZThermostat "Wohnzimmer Thermostat" (gLivingRoom) [ "Thermostat" ]
Number Thermostat_WZ_SetTemp 	"Temperatur Wohnzimmer [%.1f °C]"	<heating> 	(WZThermostat) ["TargetTemperature"] {channel="max:thermostat:KEQ0565677:KEQ0911327:set_temp"}
Number Thermostat_WZ_IsTemp 	"Ist-Temperatur [%.1f °C]"			<heating> 	(WZThermostat) ["CurrentTemperature"] {channel="max:thermostat:KEQ0565677:KEQ0911327:actual_temp"}

In the Alexa configuration, I can only see the Group item, but I guess that’s normal.

Any idea what’s wrong?

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@digitaldan, I can see you commited the CurrentTemperature feature last month. Is it possible that this is not yet included in the official Alexa skill? Any way to see which commits are included in the official, downloadable skill?

Hi,

is something planed for the future of this skill that alexa will accept custom arguments/commands like color changes for lighting?

Something like this: “Alexa, light green” or “Alexa, livingroom light disco”

It would be really nice to use other (custom) arguments/commands rather than ON/OFF, 1%-100% and so on. :relaxed:

The skill makes use of Amzon Smart Home Skill API, so it is limited to included arguments/commands.
A full reference can be found here.
Please note that some commands are limited to US versions atm.

Even though this was not meant for me, thanks for providing this link :-). Seems like the command to get the current temperature is available in the US only.

I would still be interested to know how to know which commits are included in the release version…

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I agree, and actually for the next push I was planning on marking release versions on the github release page (Releases · openhab/openhab-alexa · GitHub) , I just started doing this for the openHAB cloud code (Releases · openhab/openhab-cloud · GitHub)

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@digitaldan Perfect, thanks!
By the way, did you see my comment on this closed git issue about the Lighting tag for Color items?

Hi @dominicdesu, do I need to run the version from GitHub to have the query current temperature facility available to me?

Hi,

I have a question related to the names of your Alexa controlled items.

I have the following switch:

Switch KNX_GV_Haard_AanUit_4_3_3				"Haard - schakelaar"			<fire>							(gGV_Living) 		{ knx="4/3/4" }

FYI, “Haard” is Dutch for “fireplace”.

All my items are labeled with Dutch names. Obviously, that does not work with Alexa.

So I have added this item:

Switch Alexa_Haard									"Fireplace"								<fire>				(gAlexa) 	[ "Switchable" ]	{ knx="4/3/4" }

So I can ask Alexa to turn on/off the fireplace. This works fine.

So I’m about to duplicate all my items and give them English labels. But before I do that, isn’t there a better approach for that? How do you guys deal with multi-language labels?

You don’t need to duplicate as you can set different labels in your sitemaps.
Please have a look at the sitemap concept:
http://docs.openhab.org/configuration/sitemaps.html#concepts

Sorry, no idea, I only know that Alexa (independent of openHAB) doesn’t support querying the current temperature in German yet, I don’t know if it should work in the English openHAB skill…

See me excel approach above, thats how i do multi language, synonym approach… Works fine for me at least(except that you need to say licht on instead of licht an …)

I have the same request. I use hue emulation for harmony remote an they popup in alexa as lux lught. This is all good, but as soon as i activate openHab skill, all of those items double up. Need separate tag for alexa, is that big change?

Great timing, I was just thinking about asking this on the thread today. So originally the thought was it would be very convenient to be able to tag a item once and it automagically worked across all voice applications. In practice, this is acutally not that useful. Personally I want different items exposed to homekit, alexa and hueemulation.

That being said, homekit has added a config option to require (or not) a “homekit” tag on items in addition to the type tag (like Lighting). We could do this for Hueemualtion, but Alexa is 100% using the rest API on OH, so we have no binding to configure.

So, the question is do we make a breaking change and require a “Alexa” tag? Is there another way of doing this? Ideally we would not break people’s current configurations, but I also don’t want to create a mess by trying to support backwards compatibility was such a new feature.

All I have just pushed out color support, this is both to turn on/off/+/- color items and also supports the new color API features (US only for now) to set the HSB value of a color item (Alexa, turn light red)

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Vote YES. But adding requirement for tag in hue emulation would bring less impact to existing users.

Another YES … :slight_smile:

Is it possible that Alexa read the number item tagged with CurrentTemperature? Something like “Alexa, read temperature from bathroom”?