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[petera]

With all the disruption happening in the area of Hue emulation and Alexa it might be worth reading this brief article. The officially registered Amazon Alexa skill would appear to be the key to this. Anything that bypasses this channel appears to be under attack from the latest round of Amazon Alexa Echo firmware upgrades happening at the moment.

Many have reported a complete change in the behaviour of Alexa and in some cases non functioning automation. It appears to only affect those automation systems that do not have an associated registered Amazon Alexa skill.

Read the article and maybe it will explain some of the reasons why https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/09/28/amazon-alexa-growth-has-investors-questioning-the-business-model.html

[HA Dave]

Read the article and maybe it will explain some of the reasons why https://www.google.ie/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/09/28/amazon-alexa-growth-has-investors-questioning-the-business-model.html

News... from CNBC? Click-bait would be a better term... IMHO. I am sure Amazons intent is PROFIT (BTW... not a 4 letter word). Of course... so is CNBC's intent is to make profit, as is X10, and me... I like money too. I see nothing wrong with profit-taking. No profit, no automation. All X10 users should be well aware of that. We'd all still have fully connected CM15A's if the old X10 hadn't failed at that profit taking gig.

And although AI device sales have been in the billions of dollars... I have... like I am sure others have.... been leaning more towards Amazon branded automation products. In the HA competition.... Amazon seems to be winning (right now).

[petera]

Personally I couldn’t care less how much money Amazon make. That wasn’t the point of the post. I was purely pointing out to those who use emulation solutions the reasons why these solutions are under threat from Amazon. Clearly you don’t use emulators so it doesn’t affect you.

[HA Dave]

..... Clearly you don’t use emulators so it doesn’t affect you.

A "rogue" emulator... no. But I do run my X10 via a Homeseer device with an Alexa skill. And I have no problems what-so-ever. The skills, and platform integrations is where it's at now... and may well be the direction for the future (my crystal ball is broken). The idea that any of this stuff is static... has never been true... and isn't true now.

For DECADES Home Automation was a tiny nitch market. A technology explosion has changed much of that. Products like doorbell cams that didn't really exist before 2017... are now billion dollar industries. The changes are inherently a good thing. Without change we're living in the dark ages. 

Of course.... this is a great place/time to point-out that X10 could also introduce a skill for their WM-100... and be market friendly themselves. It's WAY PAST TIME.

[petera]

Exactly. Homeseer uses a registered skill so you’re not affected. This post was purely for emulator users. If you do experience problems you’ll report it to the relevant platform.

[petera]

For users of the HA Bridge in all it’s incarnation here is a flavour of problems other users are experiencing using Alexa. This link is to the GitHub of BWS Systems, the creator of HA Bridge. https://github.com/bwssytems/ha-bridge/issues

[Tuicemen]

Luckily users have been sharing there working HA-Bridge solutions.
One of which is sure to work if followed correctly.