This is an Alexa+ issue but worth noting if someone else has had problems as well. I have an EISY controlling multiple Insteon devices in my home. One of those devices is an I/O module garage door control. We’ve been using Alexa to open and close the door for a few years now. A few days ago I upgraded to Alexa+ and while everything else works, the garage door is suddenly a problem. With Alexa+ the performance is erratic. Sometimes Alexa+ will open/close the door upon verbal command but most of the time we get an audio message saying we must open the garage door manually and to go to the Alexa app /Devices and adjust the settings for it to work with a voice command. I will muck around in the Alexa app with the device settings (making an edit and just restoring the routine) and it will work correctly but then the next morning it reverts back to telling us we must open the door manually. It is quite apparent that something happens over a period of time and what was once a working garage door command to Alexa+ reverts back to a non-working situation. Everything else seems to work fine. It’s possibly something to do with the Garage Door command calling another program’s THEN or ELSE section depending on if an open or close command was issued. For some reason Alexa+ doesn’t handle that consistently. Alexa (non plus) works okay.

I solved the problem by discontinuing Alexa+ and going back to plain’ol Alexa. It’s a deal breaker for me. At some point issues like that will have to be resolved before I go back to Alexa+.

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!

If you look around on the forum regarding Alexa+, you`ll see several issues mentioned.

6 hours ago, Maniacal611 said:

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."

I have not gone to Alexa+ yet. But it sounds like in this instance that the program is no longer being invoked, but instead Alexa is manually turning each light off. Is this a voice command that runs the program or a routine? If it's a voice command / program link in portal, have you tried to delete the link in the Portal and recreate the link to the voice command?

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 went back to old Alexa even though I never ask for new Alexa+. One thing I found out while under Alexa+ was that a program which is shown as a scene in the Portal had to be expressed as a scene in the spoken. Example: turn on scene and your spoken word. She never looked in scenes for spoken words unless the spoken was proceeded by scene.

On 2/13/2026 at 12:28 PM, Maniacal611 said:

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

Is/was your spoken really “turn off all the lights”? It would appear (to me) Alexa+ thinks it “got smart” and was controlling anything you had in the system as a “light” and turned them off within Alexa(+) rather than the program/scene you have in IoX. I would suggest making the spoken a simple word/phrase. That way Alexa+ knows you want to control something from IoX. I think some have just a “goodnight” scene or program that is run. If you just said, “Alexa, turn on bedtime” and your bedtime spoken ran a program or turned the scene off it would work as you expect. But by using the command “Alexa, turn off all lights” it’s looking for smart devices that are lights and turning them all off. It’s goofy, but the Alexa programmers are trying to be “smart” by trying to control things within their system rather than using linked skills.

The proof is basically that you used UD Mobile and it worked as expected. Meaning Alexa+ wasn’t using the skill at all.

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.

Edited Monday at 02:51 PM1 day by Maniacal611

@Maniacal611 Thanks for the information!

Very helpful descriptions.. Verified that Alex + thinks it's pretty smart and outsmarts itself when all we wanted was a simple link to ISY.

Another option may be to change the verbal command to "Alex, go dark", but it may just literally turn itself off!

cheers.

@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!

22 hours ago, Maniacal611 said:

@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!

Not exactly, you had touse the portal when you exposed the scene to Alexa in the first place.

But it is much simpler to expose your Insteon/ISY scene to Alexa as a light or a switch and skip the routines. There are two independent designations here. 1) What it is in ISY, 2) What it is in Alexa. The two do not have to be the same. Notice that, in the portal, when you expose a device or scene (or variable, or program. . ) to Alexa, you have the option to tell Alexa it is any type of thing you want, it doesn't have to match what it is in ISY. Anything designated as a "light" or "switch" in Alexa will respond directly to voice commands. Anything designated a "scene" can only be addressed in a routine. I really don't know why you would designate something as a "scene" to Alexa. Both scenes and lights/switches are allowed to be targets of routines, so it isn't that. I guess if you want access to a device from an Alexa routine but don't want any "spoken" to trigger it, then setting it up as a scene will do that. When you set the "spoken" for a scene, it really isn't even that, it is just the name of it, speaking its name to Alexa won't do anything.

Edited 13 hours ago13 hr by apostolakisl

7 hours ago, apostolakisl said:

Not exactly, you had touse the portal when you exposed the scene to Alexa in the first place.

@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 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.

1 hour ago, Maniacal611 said:

@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 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.

Yes, new Alexa is not so literal. If you say "all lights" it doesn't look for something called "all lights", it behaves more like a human you asked to turn off all the lights. I think it is a better approach, but it takes some adjustment. I find it much better since I no longer need to say precisely the words, I can just say something that a reasonable person would recognize. And it is way better for people who don't know the words at all. And you can throw in a bunch of extraneous words like "could you please" kind of language and it doesn't mess it up.