Scenes with new Alexa skill

Other Devices & Integrations Voice Assistants
#1

I’m posting this outside the Beta so it gets seen. That topic is pretty cluttered.

So I have the new beta and latest beta firmware. Thinks work great so far. Here is my dilemma.

Before Alexa skill I was using the HA bridge, I had two scenes “Night Light On” and “Night Light Off”. I could tell Alexa with the bridge to “Alexa, turn on night light”, Alexa would trigger the scene “Night Light On”. I could tell Alexa, “Alexa, turn off night light” and Alexa would trigger the scene “Night Light Off”. These two scenes are no simple. The “on” sets lights to a dimmer setting than full on. The “off” scene first resets the dimmers to full on bright, waits 15 seconds and then turns them off. I do this so when you tap the dimmer in the morning, the dimmer comes on full bright (A wife requirement).

Now with the Alexa skill, I’m not sure how to active these two scenes separately by saying “Alexa, turn on night light” or “Alexa, turn off night light” I’m sure if “night light” were just a group, I could have them turn full on and off using these commands, but I want what I had before.

Can someone educate me on how this new skill works and how I would go about setting these up?

#2

HA bridge doesn’t present scenes to Alexa, just on/off/dim switches, but it lets you customize the on/off/dim commands where you can assign differing scenes to each command. The native skill doesn’t have anything like that and it looks like scenes can only be turned on, not off. You’ll probably have to rename the scenes to be something unique and use turn on commands for each, like “turn on night light” to enable and “turn on day light” to disable.

and yes, the HA bridge way is so much nicer and more flexible.

#3

I was thinking about this and I wonder if you could create a virtual switch that would trigger your on and off scenes. That could get around it.

#4

Thanks for the reply. Yes, while the setup on the HA-bridge was much more technical and required the java script to be running, it did offer the ability to use “ON” and “OFF” to trigger different scenes. This made it quite easy for the wife to use. I guess it needs to be added to Vera to use trigger words for scenes or something. It would be nice if vera would allow you to select a trigger word for each scene and allow that to differentiate two scenes of the same name. I guess there’s still work being done. I’m sure the dev guys must be using this themselves, right? Surly they understand the need.

#5

[quote=“Juppers, post:3, topic:195363”]I was thinking about this and I wonder if you could create a virtual switch that would trigger your on and off scenes. That could get around it.[/quote]I’m not interested in doing any coding. This is the stuff that should work and be configurable by a non-programmer. It’s basic automation. I will wait until they figure out there is a shortcoming unless they already corrected it and I just don’t know how to do it. Where’s the manual on this damn thing. LOL