getconnected.honeywell.com | I work for Honeywell. Any posts I make are purely to help if I can. Any personal views expressed are my own
Just checked mine and she is says device is not responding (had been working up to Sunday night though).
I have just bought an Amazon Dot and have downloaded the Alexa skill for our ecohome system. However, it doesn't find the system. So a rather basic question - do I need the Honeywell internet gateway for this to work? If not, what am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance
you will need the internet gateway if you have the older version of evohome - the newer wifi version won't need it. You'll also need to have an account on TCC
https://www.mytotalconnectcomfort.com/
as a general rule ALL alexa smart home skills require the device you need to control to be connected to the internet (apart from bluetooth audio, but that's not really a smart home skill)
I'm with you there.
I've basically stopped using the Echo Dot and don't use the Honeywell integration anymore either - ironically I must be the only one on this forum who didn't have problems with the Alexa skill dropping the connection - when I checked it yesterday it was still linked and working!
As much of a tech lover that I am, I've come to the conclusion that the Echo Dot (and Echo in general) in its current form is just a gimmick.
"Thousands" of skills available but 99% of them are rubbish that don't work, are too hard to use or don't do anything useful. The Skill store is full of the echo equivalent of "flashlight" apps. I tried a lot and I was not impressed. One of the skills that we were looking forward to trying (All Recipes, which is apparently very good) is not available in the UK! Why not ? Pfft...
Another one I thought might be useful was the network rail skill so I can check if the trains are running each morning - nope! Useless and unusable for that purpose.
Voice recognition seemed good at first but after more use I've come to the conclusion its worse than Siri, I frequently have to re-speak requests and certain things that Siri hears fine it doesn't get.
Even when the words are correctly recognised, comprehension of the question or request that is being made of it is also surprisingly poor outside of a few niche areas - a lot of questions that I thought it should be able to answer it cannot, while the exact same question posed to Siri gives exactly what I want. One example: "How many days are there between March 21st 2016 and November 15th 2016" - Alexa says it can't understand the question but Siri gets it right first time! And yet it can answer "how many days until November 15th 2016". Lots of other examples of failed comprehension I can think of, and Siri must have improved a lot in the last couple of years because it got nearly every general question I asked it right while Alexa was batting about 50% at most.
Some things that it can do are quite limited compared to Siri - for example weather. With Alexa it doesn't really matter how I phrase the question, I get the same general weather report. "What's the temperature", "Is it raining today", "Do I need a jacket today", "What's the weather today" all give the same full weather report for the day. With Siri you can pose it questions about the weather and it will answer the questions specifically rather than just giving you the exact same full weather report in response to every weather related question.
False activation's is a major issue that happens frequently for me - it sits in the living room near the TV/Stereo so of course can hear the sound from those, so you'd expect it to occasionally fire by mistake if someone said something that sounded like "Alexa" on a TV program.
However we get false activation's (where it wakes up and the blue ring appears to show it thought it heard Alexa, and sometimes tries to respond or say it didn't understand the question) a couple of times a night at least, and in the vast majority of cases there was nothing said that was anything REMOTELY like the word Alexa. In fact it has sometimes happened when the room is quiet! You can play back the sound clips via the Alexa app that it heard when it woke and they sound nothing like the word Alexa.
Siri went through a phase about a year ago where it would wake up and start answering "questions" in the middle of the night when we were sleeping or talking quietly... but that hasn't happened in a long time so must have been fixed. More work needed on the recognition of the activation word Amazon, too many false positives...
Here's a list of Echo features that ARE useful to me, and the only reason it stays on the shelf:
Spotify integration - voice commands can be frustrating but you can always fall back to remote controlling it with the spotify app on your phone for tricky to pronounce song or artist names, which is nice.
Bluetooth speaker support - it can be a bluetooth speaker for your phone and pipe this to your stereo. (Although only being able to auto-reconnect the most recent phone via voice command is an annoying limitation)
Tune in Radio support is nice.
Timers
That's it. If I had "smart home devices" for it to control (other than just Evohome) it might be marginally more useful.
I'm really glad I didn't waste £149 for the full Echo to find the software just isn't there yet. With the exception of not being able to get voice responses out of the built in speaker when a 3.5mm headphone jack is plugged in to your stereo, (a major and unforgivable shortcoming in the echo dot, since you can't hear the response if your AV receiver is switched elsewhere without unplugging the cable manually) the hardware is nice enough, so maybe the software will catch up eventually.
Last edited by DBMandrake; 31st January 2017 at 12:23 PM.
just get the gateway - as long as you have a spare ethernet port to plug it into, it's not wifi
I wouldn't do it just to use Alexa though - the skill bit klunky and drops it's connection (IMO) - but it is worth it to use the remote iphone/android app. This means you can control/monitor your heating from anywhere you have a phone signal
Having read DBMandrake's really useful summary above, I think I agree with you that it is only worth having for the remote control/monitoring! Bit of a problem though as I am using my only two ethernet ports on the sky Q router - Philips Hue and Homeplug - so bit of a dilemma. Its typical, I must have had home wifi for 20 years and never used one of the ethernet ports on my previous BT router which had 4. Now I have upgraded to sky Q I suddenly don't have enough!
if you get something like this:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-LINK-TL-...dp/B000FNFSPY/
you can plug it into your sky router and expand the amount of ports....or buy another homeplug, you can use multiple