Nest CoHo on Echo

[dywicked]

So, I have no idea if this is widely known or not but I wasn't aware of this so I figured share. When the Echo Tap and Dot were announced, there was also mention that Nest would have native connected home integration in Alexa in a couple of weeks.

 

However for the time being, you can get the same experience by creating a Wink account, linking your Nest account to it, Linking you Wink account in the Alexa app, and then discovering devices. Now your Nest is Coho for Alexa! No Wink hardware is necessary: http://blog.wink.com/wink-blog/2016/3/3/wink-enabled-nest-thermostats-now-work-with-amazon-echo

 

While it seems to work, there are some quirks.

 

1) Its slow, probably because there 3 service hops in the mix and its brand new / not optimized.

 

2) The name may conflict with an existing CoHo device, for me this was "living room" which are lights on my ISY. This seems to be a limitation in Alexa's lexical analyzer. Ideally it would understand the difference when I say degrees vs. percentage - but it's definitely not something easy to solve in my opinion, so I'll cut some Amazon some slack.

 

3) Related to #2, there's no way to set a specific spoken name, this seems to be something UDI has uniquely gotten right amongst all of the CoHo implementations. You can work around this by changing the name of your thermostat in the Nest app to custom and call it the same thing with the word Thermostat at the end then rediscover. There are other ways too such as the inverse in ISY for the lights, or using groups, but this worked best for me.

 

Anyway, have fun!

 

-David