Lexicon and naming convention

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Are there any published naming conventions for controlling ISY via Alexa or Google?

 

Choosing your ISY device names/scenes/groups carefully is important, especially if you want to avoid having Alexa excessively yuck at you if she detects conflicts.

 

For the most part, I setup insteon scenes and assign those to the portal. Before the portal, I used a web app I wrote (it has a forum here) that you could turn scenes on and off. Adding them to the portal was a snap, and within 5 minutes I was able to control every scene from Alexa. However I had lots of conflicts due to the ISY names I chose. Eventually I found the following works pretty well.

 

<Location><scene/device>

 

(blank) fan

master fan

den fan

 

Alexa turn fan on (turns on family room fan. Note I left the location blank, as we use this a lot)

Alexa turn den fan off

Alexa turn master fan on

 

However I have to be careful of other devices not controlled by the ISY. For example, I have the Harmony hub which turns on my TV, receiver, cable box, etc. So with the following commands, Alexa gets confused. I have no idea why.

 

Alexa turn on TV (Executes a harmony scene)

Alexa turn on TV LIGHTS (Executes an ISY scene)

 

My only solution was to change TV LIGHTS to MOVIE LIGHTS.

 

Using Alexa, I haven't found a foolproof convention. Perhaps Google does a better job.