Amazon Echo, please make devicename and visibility configurable.

Robert Herter shared this idea ago

Under Consideration

As for now the Devicename for Echo is the same as the Name and every Device is listed.

It would be nice if we could override the name and visibility in config.

So as: Name for Echo/Google Home: xxxxxxx

x Hide in Echo/Google Home

I like this idea 0

Replies (3)

Robert Hercz ●

This is a great idea, which will make life a lot easier: devices could have one name which makes sense using Voice Control and a different name displayed on Zipatile/App. One very practical use is that we would be able to use local language names in the display, and create phonetically sensible names which can be more easily understood by English (or whatever) Alexa.

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Alberto Macias ●

I agree, but this need to be done on Amazon Side. Would be even nicer if you can configure an Alias to a device, so even if the device is named "TVRoom_Bulb1" you can alias it to be "TV Room Light".

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Roland K ●

I recognize this issue as well. What I did was creating virtual devices with meaningfull names and use these with Alexa instead of the actual device names (for me in Dutch). Then simply have a rule connected to a state change of the virtual device to control the actual devices. A bit of work but does the trick.

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Jason ●

Not true that it has to be done on Amazon's side. Vera didn't have this to start and it was a pain as you had to rename most of your devices in Vera. Now you can leave them as is and just give them your own customs names when installing the vera echo skill. Zipato should do the same. Once they do I will give zipato a try with echo. So far working awesome with Vera though.

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Alberto Macias ●

I guess Zipato can also do this but Alexa already has a somewhat similar feature, grouping, if Alexa includes a way to set an alias to any device you can fix one time instead of every manufacturer of controllers. It is a nice feature on Vera, I honestly been wanting to give Vera a try but for now I rather finish my automation, too much money for many toys.

Another thing you can do is generate scenes with simple names in english on Zipato and trigger those with Alexa.

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