This is the forum archive of Homey. For more information about Homey, visit the Official Homey website.
The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
The Homey Community has been moved to https://community.athom.com.
This forum is now read-only for archive purposes.
Alexa
Comments
For most people github is a strange and intimidating beast. People like myself with limited skills in programming do not feel at home, like in an ordinary discussion forum.
I have a fairly extensive Smart Home setup, that I with my limited or non existing programming skills have configured myself.
The Homey community is an great asset, but I fear that Homey will be a platform for enthusiasts with programming skills, and slowly die due to loss of sales if ordinary customers/users feels that they is not heard because they don't feel at home at github...
In my house I now have 3 different voice recognition systems. That does not give a very good WAF, as it is confusing with different trigger words. Homey is not good enough in voice recognition, and the speaker is useless. It is also to expensive for multi-room application. Google Home have been to expensive, but with the introduction of Google Home Mini, that have changed. Amazon Alexa have been the system with best support for different Smart House Controllers, and with the dot's the natural choice for multi-room voice.
As I can control TV, Netflix, Sonos and several other devices directly trough Alexa, (or Google Home) having to Alexa to Ask Homey to do the rest is a dealbreaker, and pushing me back to my VeraPlus that I still have on stand by...
A few months ago, a post on the forum mentioned that removing the "ask Homey" part would limit the number of available commands for the user significantly.
So far I'm very happy with the progress in Homey. I work in software development and I know how much work it takes to get it right.
I asked Emile directly after they released the skill, to quote his answer "Alexa home-automation skills suck" (or something like that)
I guess he was kinda right, Alexa still only has support for lights, sockets and thermostats as far as i know.
There is a Smart Home Skill for Alexa called Yonomi. It enables me to turn on a radio station on my Sonos without specifying the TuneIn part. It requires some setup in The Yonomi app, but that is a One-Time setup.
As of now the Homey Voice Activated Home-automation skills suck more...
On my Vera-Alexa system i could dim the light to any given % by voice, and it worked every time! With Homey it is hit and miss, and I am not sure that it is possible to dim the lights to a specified % level.
My comment 'disappeared' to the closed topic, probably stuck in between the discussion... Therefor my question again. The new Sonos (Sonos One) has native Alexa built-in. Should this also work with the current Alexa skill? Does anyone has experience with this?
@Emilie: Alexa hear me perfectly, but Homey is a bit picky about the commands. If I ask to increase or decrease the lights in the living room, it works as expected (Dims/increases in steps about 25%. But to dim the lights to xx %, it seems that Homey does not dim TO XX % but dims XX %, or just dims/increases by 25%. Sometimes it seems that Homey dims the lights to the desired %, but most of the time Homey seems to just decreasing light by a fixed amount (25% ?)
Has anyone have problems with the connection between Homey and Alexa recently? Up to a week ago, everything was fine and working. Now it seems Alexa can't find Homey and responds at all commands with "you don't have any smarthome devices, go to the alexa app..."
If the skill simply should be working, does anyone has an idea what could be the problem? (I tried turning everything on/off and dis-/enabled the skill)
If u get that message "you don't have any smarthome devices, go to the alexa app..." this means that alexa it self is trying to handle the commands , so she is not relaying the message to homey.
I figured this out when i went to the Alexa site under History u can see the text that she hears.
Whenever she gave me this error she either heard "Harmony" or "Homie"
I had to pronounce Homey a little more american for her to understand
Can someone look into this?
works great in english and german language!
Tried it and works like a charm! I can now just call for a device and it immediatly turns it on/off or dims. However, it does not recognizes the groups (E.g. all lights in the living room) set in Homey, which is something i think is still missing. Fortunatly, I see in the Alexa app that you can creat groups there as well, thus i think this can be resolved in that way.
Overall, I'm really happy about this. After an initial 10 minutes testing and already think that speech recognizition with Homey has made a leap forward this way.
Update: Well forget the Problem with server not reacting. Alexa or Homey took a few minutes till working....Now there is another Problem. Not all devices are there. I miss some devices.
Please correct me if i'm wrong.
Not all devices are supported by Alexa or the skill, if you have missing devices best it to open up a github issue so Athom can take a look if the device can be added
I hacked HA Bridge to work with this, but I'm unsure where the issue actually lies - presumably the lightwave app on Homey
[EDIT] Looks like Honeywell devices can't even be changed by Homey itself. Changing a temperature doesn't do anything.