Room awareness enhancement: add popular device types such as Fan, Air Conditioner, Set-top-box and let users change device type
Room awareness enhancement: add popular device types such as Fan, Air Conditioner, Set-top-box and let users change device type to their favorite. Now Alexa app allows changing device type between Light and Switch for some smart plug devices. But it would be great if for any device, users can define it as light, fan, air conditioner or set-top-box... and the room awareness feature will help simplify voice command. Users just can say: turn on the air conditioner, turn on the fan...
This device-type-changing feature will be very powerful when an infrared/RF universal remote control like Broadlink is connected to alexa. All traditional “dumb” devices can be voice controlled by alexa taking advantage of the room awareness feature.
Minh
shared this idea
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Ranee E Capser
commented
I have two rooms (Living Room and Master Bedroom) with two Lutron Caseta smart switches in each. With the groups set up for room awareness, I can say "Turn on the lights" in either room and it works. However, when I say "Turn on the fan", Alexa responds with "A few things share the name fan", even though there is exactly one fan in each group with one Alexa device. I don't see why there should be a difference or why the lights work as expected and the fans don't.
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Edin Beslagic
commented
This is a great idea.
It was frustrating to deal with plugs in multiple rooms until I tried the very last thing I would think to do, which is to change their type to "lights" for a room-contextual operation.
It feels like any device and any label I assign to them "lights" (even though it's a "plug") should be treated that way.