[CharlesW]

> It's actually easier now then ever before.

Agreed, but Alexa fails hard if you have no internet, and my understanding is that Google Home also becomes mostly inoperable.

I've tried Home Assistant but could never get it to work reliably. HomeKit is great and works offline if you have a home hub (an Apple TV, a HomePod, or an iPad).

[petemir]

> Agreed, but Alexa fails hard if you have no internet

It also fails hard with Internet. I’m sick of being on my living room asking Alexa to turn on the light just to get the bedroom light turned on (each room has its own Alexa/Light pair, so there should be no confusion).

[vidarh]

If they're assigned to the same room as the lights there shouldn't be, but check in the (awful) app which of your Alexa devices picked up your voice.

Walls reflect sound, and things like curtains muffle it, and you might be surprised which device picks up your voice best in different positions.

I had to adjust placement etc. to prevent the Alexa in my son's room from regularly picking up my commands from my room better than the Alexa in my room when the doors are open.

[petemir]

Yes, I had interference at one moment and moved the devices to the farthest points on each room, so that doesn't happen now, but the problem I mentioned before (turning on the wrong light) still happens.

I forgot to say that the problem mostly occurs when I ask Alexa to set the (unspecified, but hopefully the one belonging to the room the corresponding Echo is) light's brightness to X. Sometimes, in that case, it turns on the light from the other room.

I didn't check the audio transcript when this happens though, that's a good one, thanks.

[vidarh]

That's an odd one. Not seen that. Lots of aggravating little quirks, though. Annoyingly so many of them would be trivially addressable by users if we just had a way of adding simple rules.

E.g. "this request on this device refers to X", or more generally "when you hear X it probably means Y".

As an alternative, I've spent more time than I should passive-aggressively repeating the same instruction and then flagging every single failure in the app. I have no idea if it makes any difference, or if the things I've done that with that have improved were due to general improvements to their voice recognition, but it gives me some limited satisfaction (I now wonder what the financial tradeoff is of fixing the reported issues vs. any benefit potentially gained by just having the reporting function but sending it straight to the bin to make people feel like they're being heard...)

One of my goals for this year is to experiment with HomeAssistant or similar to at least start to replace or supplement my Alexas.

[petemir]

hah, I've been doing the same, purposefully calling commands I know will fail so I can flag them, even adding a swear word or two so it also gets flagged on their side and, perhaps, someone can then take action. But in the end, the smarter choice (despite being talking about smart devices), was to change my commands to accommodate Alexa’s quirks.

I’ve installed home assistant recently too for the flexibility, but until I get a zigbee stick I still depend on Alexa as the interface with the lights.

[corethree]

Try google assistant. Google assistant actually has a little bit of an LLM in it, so it's a bit smarter.

[jfim]

It's still pretty dumb, though. For example, it'll often misunderstand "turn all the lights off" as turn the lights off or worse, turn the lights on (even though they're already on).

[stacktrust]

Alexa has been most reliable when a command does not require a third-party cloud service.

For Amazon Basics WiFi smart plugs, the device type can be configured as "Light" instead of "Plug".

Echo 4 works as a Zigbee hub, avoiding dependency on a third-party cloud service.