Maniacal611

@apostolakisl You are correct. I didn’t mean to imply that I exposed an Insteon device to Alexa without going through the UD Portal. Configuring a routine so that I could say “Alexa, go dark” was just me experimenting to determine if I could expand the Alexa+ vocabulary beyond what is available via the UD Portal (Ex., “Turn On/Off”, “Set <device>” or “Lock”). The primary issue I was addressing was that after I upgraded to Alexa+, an EISY program which was associated with the UD Portal spoken “All Lights” no longer worked. My EISY scenes exposed to Alexa+ worked fine. Remember, if you add an EISY program to the UD Portal with a spoken for Alexa, there isn’t a “program” category to pick. You must choose from “scene”, “light”, “switch”, “outlet”, or “device with open/close syntax”. Selecting “scene” worked fine under old Alexa. Alexa+ is apparently defaulting “All Lights” as meaning any device type defined in Alexa+ as “lights”. It stopped looking for a UD Portal scene that matched “All Lights”. I’m not sure if Alexa+ changed its search priority to not look first at scenes that match the spoken, or if something else is going on. However, creating a routine to tell Alexa+ that “All Lights” is a scene resolved the issue. If there is another solution that involved configuring EISY or the UD portal, it eluded me.

@dbwarner5 Per your suggestion I just created an Alexa+ routine to run my ISY scene when I say "Alexa, go dark" and it worked perfectly. It ran my EISY program and turned off all my lights. And I didn't have to use the UD Portal to set this up...I did it all in the Alexa app. I'm glad I encountered this problem because I'm learning more about Alexa's capabilities. Thanks for the suggestion!

Hi! I apologize for the rather lengthy response. To reiterate, the problem I’m trying to resolve is when I switched to Alexa+, a voice command I created in UD Portal to run an EISY program was no longer working. The specific voice command was “Alexa, turn off all lights” which then ran an EISY program that turned off 27 Insteon lights and set 2 state variables. The program had no IF conditions. The THEN action turned on the lights, and the ELSE action turned off the lights. To better understand and resolve the issue I took the following actions yesterday: CONFIRM THE PROBLEM STILL EXISTS: Alexa+ Voice Command: “Alexa, turn off all lights” Alexa+ Response: Alexa turned off Insteon lights very slowly. The non-Insteon lights did not turn off. The non-Insteon lights are controlled via Home Assistant and EISY triggers HA to control the lights via EISY state variables. Since these lights never turned off, I have to assume the EISY program associated with the UD Portal is not being run, or at least not being run completely. I now believe Alexa+ treats the “All lights” voice command uniquely and interprets it to have Alexa+ turn off the lights using the Power Interface. As per the web: When asking Alexa to "turn off all lights," it initiates a global command to turn off every device classified as a light in the Alexa app across your entire home. In other words, Alexa isn’t calling the ISY skill to turn off the lights. ADDING THE WORD “SCENE” TO THE VOICE COMMAND FIXES THE PROBLEM: Alexa+ Voice Command: “Alexa, turn off scene all lights” Alexa+ Response: Alexa turned off all Insteon and non-Insteon lights immediately. This is the behavior I want. garbixler, you are correct. In order to get Alexa+ to behave like old Alexa when using UD Portal vocal commands, you can add the word "scene" to the command. While this works, I wasn't completely happy with having to change what I asked Alexa+ to do. TELLING ALEXA HOW TO INTERPRET MY ORIGINAL VOCAL ALSO FIXES THE PROBLEM: Alexa+ Voice Command: “Alexa, when I tell you to turn off the lights, I want you to ask ISY to turn off all lights” Alexa+ Response: Alright, just a moment while I work on that. This caused Alexa+ to create a routine that does the following: WHEN Anyone says “Alexa, turn off all lights” ALEXA WILL “ask i.s.y. to turn off all lights” With the Alexa routine in place, when I tell Alexa+ "Alexa, turn off all lights", it immediately turns off all (i.e., Insteon and non-Insteon) just like old Alexa did. I assume this tells Alexa+ to let ISY handle responding to the command, which is what I want so that my EISY program is executed. I didn't delete and re-create my UD Portal Alexa vocal commands to make this work. Note: I tried deleting and recreating this routine later, but it didn’t work. I’m not sure why it failed to work the second time. Alexa+’s response was nonsensical as it told me it couldn’t invoke ISY directly, but that executing the routine would work. Clearly it didn’t work. CHANGING THE VOCAL TO SOMETHING OTHER THAN “ALL LIGHTS” FIXES THE PROBLEM: Apparently “All lights” has a special meaning to Alexa+. If I change the vocal to “Emergency lights” then everything works fine. Alexa+ Voice Command: “Alexa, turn off emergency lights” Alexa+ Response: Alexa turned off all Insteon and non-Insteon lights immediately, which indicates it's running my EISY program. This is the behavior I want. DELETING AND RECREATING THE ORIGINAL “ALL LIGHTS” UD PORTAL VOCAL DID NOT WORK: I deleted and recreated the UD Portal entry. This did not fix the problem. I went so far as to delete and recreate both the EISY program and the UD Portal entry, but this didn’t fix the issue. I now understand that "all lights" has a special meaning to Alexa+ and that is the Achilles heel that was preventing Alexa+ from calling the ISY skill to execute my program. CREATING A CUSTOM ROUTINE TO CONFIRM “ALL LIGHTS” IS A SCENE FIXES THE PROBLEM To keep the voice command “All lights”, my final solution was to create 2 custom routines, one to handle the voice command “Alexa, turn on all lights”, and the other to handle the voice command “Alexa, turn off all lights”. By creating these 2 routines, I don’t have to change my voice command to include the word “scene”. The “Alexa, turn off all lights” routine specifies the following: WHEN Anyone says “Alexa, turn off all lights” ALEXA WILL Set scene for All lights The reason 2 Alexa+ routines are needed is because you must specify if the voice command will turn the scene on or off. With these routines in place, when I say “Alexa, turn off all lights”, Alexa+ correctly invokes the ISY skill and the EISY program is run, behaving exactly as I want. I can retain my UD portal voice command "all lights" as before with old Alexa. SUMMARY: To get Alexa+ to correctly execute the UD Portal voice command “Alexa, turn off all lights”, and run my EISY program, I created 2 routines to explicitly tell Alexa+ that “all lights” is a scene. This avoids me having to add the word “scene” to my voice command and everything works as it did with old Alexa.

dbwarner5, I speak a voice command to Alexa which then invokes the EISY program. The EISY program turns on 1 scene and sets 2 variables. The scene has 27 Insteon devices. I like your idea to delete and recreate the link in the UD Portal. I'll move back to Alexa+ tomorrow and recreate the vocal command. I'll report back here with the results.

I activated Alexa+ about a week ago. I did deactivate and re-activate the ISY skill after moving to Alexa+. BTW - Amazon moved where the Alexa Skills are located in their mobile app, which I found frustrating to locate. Initially my Alexa+ commands requesting activation of EISY scenes seemed to be working fine. But I have one Alexa+ command that calls an EISY program that then calls a scene to turn off all the lights in my house. I put this in a program because I also needed to set several variables to invoke Home Assistant actions. The "turn off all lights" scene controls 27 Insteon lights and one virtual device. Whether the scene was invoked directly or via a EISY program, it was always fast and immediate under old Alexa. However, when I asked Alexa+ to turn off all the lights, the behavior changed. Now each light is turned off individually, almost as if I had 27 separate device commands in the program with a "Wait" between them. The behavior went from "Boom! All the lights are out!" To "Wait while I slowly turn off each and every light. Relax because this will take a while." Today I did an experiment. I invoked the scene from the UD mobile app and as expected the lights turned off immediately. Then I invoked the THEN part of the program from the UD mobile app and the lights turned off immediately. Now I suspected Alexa+ was the problem. I then told Alexa+ to revert back to old Alexa. Once that had been completed, I asked old Alexa to turn off all lights, and all the lights went out immediately. Reverting back to old Alexa fixed my issues. Clearly there are some weird behaviors with how Alexa+ is interfacing with the ISY skill. Until these Alexa issues get resolved, I'm going to stay with old reliable Alexa!

It wasn't obvious to me that sharing a device would use a QR code (I never needed to share a device before). So, I tried sharing a device from Home Assistant to EISY. HA generated a QR code which I scanned with UD Mobile. But it failed the same as before.

oberkc, That is my understanding as well. Home Assistant has the capability to share paired devices, but I'm not seeing any corresponding function in AC or UD Mobile to accept a shared matter device. I had an unused matter device I tested EISY with. My testing strategy was to first confirm the matter device was good by pairing it with a known good controller/hub (i.e., Home Assistant). Before attempting to pair with EISY, I deleted it from HA followed by a factory reset on the device, which automatically put it into pairing mode.

I am confident that the matter QR code I attempted to pair with EISY is valid, because I successfully paired it and other similar matter devices with Home Assistant. Below is the AC matter log from my last attempt to add a matter device. The "Failed to read" errors caught my attention, but I can't say if those are relevant to this issue. 2025-02-23 10:11:56.938] [D] [iox] ZMatter Rest Command 12 : connected=T enabled=T [2025-02-23 10:11:56.938] [D] [iox] UYMProcessCommand.run - Begin - cmdId=12 ec=0 okToRun=T [2025-02-23 10:13:26.923] [D] [iox] ZMatter Rest Command 201 : connected=T enabled=T [2025-02-23 10:13:26.923] [D] [iox] UYMProcessCommand.run - Begin - cmdId=201 ec=0 okToRun=T [2025-02-23 10:13:26.923] [D] [iox] API content: {"api": "set_setup_code","parameters": {"setupCode": "MT:ERS00WMV17G0OR46S10"}} [2025-02-23 10:13:26.923] [D] [iox] set_setup_code(setupcode="MT:ERS00WMV17G0OR46S10", rendezvousType=""); rc=0 [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] ZMatter Rest Command 204 : connected=T enabled=T [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] UYMProcessCommand.run - Begin - cmdId=204 ec=0 okToRun=T [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] Get Matter Device Info [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] * setupCode.version = Err: Failed to read, ignored [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] * setupCode.vendorID = Err: Failed to read, ignored [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] * setupCode.productID = Err: Failed to read, ignored [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] * setupCode.shortDiscriminator = Err: Failed to read, ignored [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] * setupCode.longDiscriminator = Err: Failed to read, ignored [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] * setupCode.setupPINCode = Err: Failed to read, ignored [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] * setupCode.rendezvousType = Err: Failed to read, ignored [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] * setupCode.commissioningFlow = Err: Failed to read, ignored [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] * setupCode = Err: Failed to read, ignored [2025-02-23 10:13:26.970] [D] [iox] Get Matter Device Info Complete UD Mobile responded with this error: Could not get Matter QR Code rendezvousType. 500

From what I've read, the initial rollout of IoX v5.9.1 either supports a very limited number of matter devices, or the ability to add a matter device is not yet available. All my attempts to add a matter device have resulted in failure with the same message you got.