Amazon Discover duplicates Portal devices

[larryllix]

Wondering why alexa began complaining of duplicate names on items yesterday I tried to change some offending names that have been working for years now. In particular I had two items named "T V" and "T V lights" that alexa started complaining of having two names the same.

Entering the app on my cell phone I found multiple devices using the name "T V". I did another discover and alexa reported no new devices. Another instance of "T V" appeared in the app. Now I had four instances of the same name as well as several instances of every device now.

I manually deleted all but one "T V" and did another discover. Another instance of "T V" device appeared.

Back to the drawing board I disabled my ISY Portal account from the alexa account app, and then installed it again. More of the same with duplicates.
Then I disabled the ISY account again, did a discover which found all the devices exactly the same again but none of them work because the device or account was not ready.
Exiting and killing the app from running in the background each time I repeated the process with discovery and app kill between every stage. Alexa just remembers every device and will not forget anything.

So it looks like between the ISY Portal skill, and Amazon accounts, something is a real mess. Somebody has eliminated the "delete devices" feature   a long time back, and yet any automatic cleanup of unrecognised, or defunct devices, is not functioning anymore.

Each time a Alexa discovery is done, every device is duplicated one more time. Alexa never forgets (They think they are gaggle home)

[bmercier]

8 hours ago, larryllix said:

Wondering why alexa began complaining of duplicate names on items yesterday I tried to change some offending names that have been working for years now. In particular I had two items named "T V" and "T V lights" that alexa started complaining of having two names the same.

Entering the app on my cell phone I found multiple devices using the name "T V". I did another discover and alexa reported no new devices. Another instance of "T V" appeared in the app. Now I had four instances of the same name as well as several instances of every device now.

I manually deleted all but one "T V" and did another discover. Another instance of "T V" device appeared.

Back to the drawing board I disabled my ISY Portal account from the alexa account app, and then installed it again. More of the same with duplicates.
Then I disabled the ISY account again, did a discover which found all the devices exactly the same again but none of them work because the device or account was not ready.
Exiting and killing the app from running in the background each time I repeated the process with discovery and app kill between every stage. Alexa just remembers every device and will not forget anything.

So it looks like between the ISY Portal skill, and Amazon accounts, something is a real mess. Somebody has eliminated the "delete devices" feature   a long time back, and yet any automatic cleanup of unrecognised, or defunct devices, is not functioning anymore.

Each time a Alexa discovery is done, every device is duplicated one more time. Alexa never forgets (They think they are gaggle home)

The easiest way to clean devices is to delete them all, and let the discovery create them. This way, you are sure not to delete the good one and keep the bad ones.

Benoit

[larryllix]

1 minute ago, bmercier said:

The easiest way to clean devices is to delete them all, and let the discovery create them. This way, you are sure not to delete the good one and keep the bad ones.

Benoit

There is no "Delete all devices" in the android app any more. It was eliminated a few years ago.

However I found one in the amazon browser webpage still. 

That doesn't solve the duplication of every device each "Discover"

[bmercier]

After clearing and doing a discovery, they are still duplicated?

In your spoken mapping (In the Alexa app dialog), if you have multiple "spoken" words per devices, that will create identical devices with a different Alexa name.

If that does not solve the issue, could you please open a ticket with your uuid referencing this thread? I will look at the logs.

[larryllix]

2 hours ago, bmercier said:

After clearing and doing a discovery, they are still duplicated?

In your spoken mapping (In the Alexa app dialog), if you have multiple "spoken" words per devices, that will create identical devices with a different Alexa name.

If that does not solve the issue, could you please open a ticket with your uuid referencing this thread? I will look at the logs.

I  cleared out all devices via the windows browser and did a new discover. That only created one device for each spoken phrase. However, I did not try to repeat discover again as previously it would create another copy of every device, so I left it alone.

I may try this tomorrow to test this again, as now  I know how to recover from it. I had 3 to 5 copies of almost every pseudo device (spoken phrase) in my alexa app before.

Since the amazon app offers no way to delete all devices, I suspect this must have been some amazon failure of their automatic clean-up for redundant devices during discovery.

[larryllix]

@bmercier I attempted the repeat discover again and no components from ISY Portal were duplicated this time.

I conclude that I must have caught amazon in some transitional stage when I did a discover and it duplicated everything I had. IIRC some devices were duplicated 3-4 times while others were not duplicated at all. My attention was attracted when alexa repeatedly advised there were multiple devices with the same names and wouldn't operate certain devices/programs.

All good now. Thanks.

[larryllix]

@bmercier A further update: Something at amazon definitely was changed as any of my devices with multiple vocals containing the same words get asked about to reaffirm which device I want, now.

eg: For alarm system i use two (or more) different vocals. ie: "alarm" and "alarm system".

If I ask....

"Alexa... turn on alarm"
Alexa  will respond with "You said alarm, right?"

This was not happening before this week. Either vocal syntax could be used without further query back. I have many vocal using multiple length options like this and the change has caused me lots of maintenance now. Most of these are due to being new,, and the familiar syntax (by humans) was not established until a few usages.

[MrBill]

5 hours ago, larryllix said:

"Alexa... turn on alarm"
Alexa  will respond with "You said alarm, right?"

Something has definitely changed in the cloud.  I make all of my spoken's pretty unique and she's questioning me a lot about what I mean.....  for like the past 2 weeks, maybe 3

[madcodger]

We've noticed a definite degradation in services/usability in our Alexa devices for the past many (8 or more?) weeks. We ask it so ething typical "Alexa, what's the weather forecast?", and it just doesn't seem to understand. Same people/location/placement/everything - just a less-"alert" Alexa. 

 

No need to offer solutions. No one here is going to "fix" it. Just another observation re: Alexa.

[larryllix]

22 minutes ago, madcodger said:

We've noticed a definite degradation in services/usability in our Alexa devices for the past many (8 or more?) weeks. We ask it so ething typical "Alexa, what's the weather forecast?", and it just doesn't seem to understand. Same people/location/placement/everything - just a less-"alert" Alexa. 

 

No need to offer solutions. No one here is going to "fix" it. Just another observation re: Alexa.

We use "Alexa...what time is it?" to establish it has disconnected from WiFi. I have jumped up to a mesh network WiFi router and I think with all the automatic amplitude adjusting they do it makes Alexa boxes switch routers occasionally and gives a lot of dead times, we aren't supposed to notice.

[madcodger]

On 6/6/2020 at 7:28 AM, larryllix said:

We use "Alexa...what time is it?" to establish it has disconnected from WiFi. I have jumped up to a mesh network WiFi router and I think with all the automatic amplitude adjusting they do it makes Alexa boxes switch routers occasionally and gives a lot of dead times, we aren't supposed to notice.

Hmmm... I wonder if that's our issue...? I have two access points on our property, each on a separate, non-overlapping wifi channel from the other. It works well, but sometimes a device will see the weaker AP and lock onto it. I'm getting ready to change the antennas a bit for an unrelated reason, but will be interesting to see if that helps (or hurts). Thanks for the idea.