Multiple Alexa devices and avoiding saying "office" when I'm in the office.

Other Devices & Integrations Voice Assistants
1

I’ve just started looking at the Alexa integration and I do have just one Amazon Dot at the moment so I’m just qurious here.

At the moment I name my z-wave devices with custom names like “Office light”, “Office desk light”, “Kitchen light” etc to separate them. Iow; I have to say “Kitchen” when I’m in the kitchen and I have to say “Office” when I’m in the office.
Lets say I have an Amazon Dot/Echo in each room. Would it be possible to make it so that when the Amazon device in the office pick up the command, it directs the commands to the room one are in by default Iow; When I’m in the office I just need to say “Alexa: turn light on”.

Not sure I have a question here. Its more a feature suggestion.

2
  1. Create one amazon account for each room
  2. Add a dot or alexa to each amazon account
  3. Create one Vera user in the same account for each room
  4. For each Vera user, use a different amazon account to enroll to alexa
  5. Custom names and selected devices are per Vera user
  6. Add all amazon accounts in the same family.

This will provide the result that you want - currently, Alexa does not provide a way to have different names for the same device depending on the Alexa / Dot used, so we “fake” that by having multiple integrations with alexa, one per user.

3

This is, in my opinion, a big issue with Amazon’s implementation. The author of the ha-bridge software tried to add in a feature to allow this, but wasn’t successful due to issues with Amazon’s implementation. Specifically, I tried to work with the author of the ha-bridge software to filter requests by the IP address of the requesting echo/dot device and then issue the appropriate light on/off command based on the roof of the echo/dot, but Amazon’s implementation doesn’t make this possible (or at least didn’t, last year when we tried it). Specifically, the IP address of the “requesting” echo/dot device did not match the IP address of the echo/dot device that originally received the command. For example, if I told the living room echo to turn on the lights, the living room echo sent my command to the cloud to parse it, but then instead of sending it back to the living room echo to send to the bridge, the cloud sends it “round robin” style to any of the echos/dots in your house. It’s a bit confusing to follow, but basically it’s not possible right now to parse out commands by the source echo/dot.

The problem with creating separate Amazon accounts is you lose the integrated functionality of the Echo/Dot not to have multiple Echo/Dot devices respond to the same command. In my case, both the living room and kitchen devices often “hear” the same command, but the closest unit is the (only) one that processes the command. With separate accounts, everything would go haywire.