I recently started to switch over to smart lighting in my house, and overall I really like the integration with Alexa. After all, being able to control your lights using voice commands to your Echo is much more convenient than pulling out your mobile device and launching the philips Hue lights app.
However, I have had some integration problems along the way when trying to connect Philips Hue lights to Alexa, and there are some features available in the Philips hue app that may not work seamlessly in Alexa. Hence, I wanted to cover these in this article and explain how to fix or work around some of these problems (if possible). This way, you can have better control over your connected philips hue lights and ensure a smoother experience when connect hue lights to your alexa compatible device.
Read on for the text version covering my 5 annoyances with Alexa Hue integration, or feel free to check out my YouTube video instead:
Issue 1: Bulb/room naming confusion
When you’re first setting things up in the Philips Hue app on your mobile device, it’s hard to know what to name each bulb and room.
After all, if you’re just starting out with smart lighting and you have a single bulb per room, it’s tempting to do what I did and call your room and the bulb inside it the same name, e.g., “Hallway.”
This can make it convenient to use the search bar to type Philips Hue on your mobile device when you want to adjust the lighting in a specific room.
However this causes an issue when you import your philips hue bulbs into Alexa, since it doesn’t see any difference between the room and the light – resulting in lots of duplicates:
The issue here, other than the Amazon Alexa app having lots of duplicates, is that when you say “Alexa, turn on my bedroom light” to your Echo device, your Alexa will reply with “A few things share the name ‘my bedroom light’; which one did you want?“
Annoyingly if you then just say “my bedroom light“, Alexa will turn on your bedroom light without further complaints!
Fixing this issue
Unfortunately the solution is to rename either your room or the lights in the philips hue bridge, so that they are no longer the same. I did this by renaming my lights, and giving them silly names that I won’t say to Alexa:
Then I had to delete each light and scene from the Alexa app. This can take ages to do if you have various lights, especially due to how many scenes get imported (see issue 5 for more on this!). But if you don’t have many other smart devices setup in your Alexa app, go to http://alexa.amazon.com/ and clicking ‘Smart Home’ then ‘Devices’ and scroll down to the ‘Forget All’ button:
Warning: clicking this will clear out any other smart devices you have added, so only do this if you’ve only imported philips hue bulbs so far – or you are happy to re-add all your other devices!
Anywhoo, once Alexa is cleared out and the rooms/light names don’t have any duplicates within the philips hue app, you can discover new devices again in the Alexa app and this time there won’t be duplicates:
This means that when you say “Alexa, turn on bedroom light”, it will work without issue.
Unless, of course, issue 2 affects you..!
Issue 2: Alexa thinks there’s light bulb duplicates
I’ve worked out that when I say “Alexa, please turn on my bedroom light“, Alexa will sometimes do this – but other times, she will say “A few things share the name ‘my bedroom light’; which one did you want?” – grr!
However when I say “Alexa, bedroom light on“, she always carries out this action without any issue.
This is a bit odd, and many people online have spoken about this problem as well. It’s possibly down to a software bug, or simply Alexa mishearing my request.
The solution
If this issue is happening to you, the first thing to do is make sure that you have no rooms and/or bulbs with similar sounding names – see issue 1’s solution for how to do this.
Assuming everything is fine on that front, however, the next thing to do is speak as clearly as possible when issuing light bulb requests to Alexa. If you think there’s a chance that she’s mishearing you, launch the Alexa app and click the menu in the top left. Go to “Settings”, and then “Alexa Privacy”, before finally clicking “Review Voice History”. You will see something like this:
If you see that she’s clearly misheard you – such as in the above where we asked to play ‘Rose between two thorns’ but she heard it as ‘Rose between a thongs’ (also a great song!).
Yesterday we said “Alexa, goodnight” to trigger our goodnight routine that includes turning off various light bulbs, and she heard it as “Alexa, go home”. At the time we were baffled by her response (she said something like ‘I can’t currently support that request’!?), but reviewing the activity logs back, I understand why she got confused.
Finally, if Alexa is hearing you correctly but still asking you about duplicates, there’s a chance that this is a genuine glitch in the Alexa AI. I have found that saying “my [room]” causes Alexa to give me the duplicate error more than if I just say “[room]”.
So try and find a particular phrase that works for each room/bulb, and keep using that to control your bulbs. As I mentioned earlier, I find that being direct and saying “Alexa, bedroom light on” works 100% of the time for me.
Issue 3: Philips Hue Routines can’t be triggered in Alexa
The Philips Hue app allows you to create routines based on time, sunset/sunrise and also gentle wake-up alarms whereby your bedroom light slowly becomes brighter to wake you up in a way that should make you feel refreshed (unless you’re like me and get 6.5 – 7 hours of sleep a night and drink too much coffee!):
You can also create routines based on time and sunset/sunrise in Alexa, but some of the other philips hue routines – such as the wake-up alarm – is not as easy to replicate in the Alexa app.
As a result, you’d hope that you can trigger and control philips hue routines via the Alexa app – so that you have master Alexa routines, and they can trigger the ‘sub’ philips hue routines. Unfortunately this isn’t possible:
Therefore if you have a particularly interesting philips hue routine, you can’t trigger this from some other device’s action like your Ring doorbell being pressed.
Solution
The main solution is to handle as much smart light automation as possible within the Alexa app.
In other words, turn lights on/off (or change their brightness/color, of course) within Alexa app – especially since Alexa supports a range of routine triggers including time based and sunrise/sunset based.
If you really can’t do something you want via the Alexa app, add this as a ‘one off’ routine within the philips hue app. The sunrise/sunset alarms are a good example of this – you can’t progressively make the brightness lower in the Alexa app, so this should be done in the philips hue account app instead. Of course, this does mean that you can’t then trigger this philips hue routine with your voice.
One half-solution, though, is that any Hue Lab Formulas that you add will be detected within the Alexa app as a ‘Scene’. You can then select “Control scene” within the Alexa routine, allowing you to trigger Hue Lab Formulas (such as auto-changing color) from routines. This is a nice approach to take, and I have published a walkthrough for this which you can watch below:
Issue 4: no Alexa ‘color wheel’, so less color choice
One of the big selling points of smart bulbs is the ability to change the color: philips hue Color bulbs have 16 million colors to choose from, and their White Ambiance bulbs have 50,000 shades of yellow, white and blue to choose from.
This is done by using a color wheel – also called a color picker – in the Philips Hue app:
This works really well, both for white ambiance bulbs (as pictured above) and Hue color bulbs too. However in the Alexa app, you get a lot less choice. You can either choose between five shades of white:
Or choose from a preset list of 123 colors (with the Hue Color bulbs).
In other words, White Ambiance bulbs – with 50,000 shades – only gives 5 choices within Alexa, and Color bulbs – with 16,000,000 shades – only gives 123 choices within Alexa app.
This is a substantial dropping off of choice when switching to Alexa app.
Solution
The Hue skill (within Alexa) is maintained by Philips Hue smart lights, so perhaps Hue will push out an update and give more color options in due course. To be honest though, I doubt this will be the case.
After all, the Hue team will prefer that people use the Hue app – they want to provide some features via Alexa, but not all of them otherwise people won’t use the Hue app (I say that as a software developer who’s worked on many multi-team projects in the past!).
The only other solution is to use scenes within Alexa, since scenes can be set to any of the Hue colors (within the Hue app), and then imported in to Alexa. This does, thankfully, work quite well, but it also brings me onto issue 5.
Issue 5: Alexa has no scenes filter
Hue offers a ‘scenes’ feature, which is where your bulbs can be set to a particular color and brightness setting to simulate a specific event:
This can be as simple as dimming a bulb, or setting it to ‘Tropical twilight’ which sets the color/brightness so the bulb emits a nice, chilled out effect.
The scenes in the Hue app are organized per room/bulb, meaning that even with a lot of scenes, it’s easy enough to manage them.
Unfortunately in the Alexa app, it’s one big list of “Scene – Room/Bulb” meaning that it comes out like this:
At least they are sorted alphabetically in this list (via the routines page), but they aren’t grouped by bulb meaning that you have “Arctic aurora” for “Landing” right at the top, then “Tropical twilight” for “Landing” somewhere towards the bottom.
This makes it hard to manage with just 5 bulbs, and it’d be essentially impossible to manage with 50 bulbs! Adding a simple search/filter would be a nice idea.
Solution
Unfortunately there’s no solution right now. We just have to hope that Alexa’s “Hue” skill does add this capability sometime soon.
It’s a pity that being able to search/filter isn’t an option, because scenes would have been a nice solution to issue 4 (the lack of color choice), but in this case neither the color choice nor scenes is great within Alexa.
I noticed the following scenario:
• There are scenes that are recognized and managed correctly by Alexa, even if they are not checked to activate them within the rooms / groups created in Alexa. For example, if I say, “Alexa, turn on power in the living room,” Alexa executes. For many other scenes such as “Sunset”, “Relax”, “Reading”, Alexa receives the command but does not execute.
• If I flag the non-functioning scene in the room / group, then everything works. Unfortunately, if doing so solves one problem, another one is created. When you ask Alexa to turn the lamp off, she replies that the accessory is not configured (but in reality she turns it off). If I remove the check from all the scenes added to the room / group, the error message in the shutdown phase magically disappears, but obviously you go back to the problem with the scenes that are not activated
That’s frustrating kaporion, thanks for the comment! Yes I’ve also noticed some of what you mention, especially when Alexa recognizes “turn on/off power” for a bulb, but not switching to a particular scene. I’ve had slightly better luck with changing colors (“Alexa, set living room to blue”) but it’s not always perfect.
Hi there. Thanks for the post. A quick question If I may. I started with using my Alexa as my bridge years ago and so all my lights are paired with it and named and all my routines are set up. I want to take better advantage of the color and scene potentials however, so I bought a Hue bridge. While it’s linked with Alex, Hue doesn’t recognize any lights. I’m guessing I need to delete all my lights from Alexa and repair them with Hue, then recreate routines. Seems like a major hassle so just wanted to check to see if you see a way around that. And thanks!
Hi Adam,
Yes unfortunately I think that you’re correct – you’ll essentially need to start again with those lights. Luckily Alexa has an online application at https://alexa.amazon.com/ which helps speed this up a little bit. So I’d make sure that all lights are deleted, and then double check that there’s no Alexa-Zigbee related skills. Once everything is removed, hopefully you can then set it up properly.
I’ve found another annoyance that may be particular to our setup. We can plug our Hue bridge into one of our wifi mesh nodes and control the lights through the Hue App and Apple Home, but not Alexa; or plug the bridge into our router and then use Alexa to control the lights but not Apple Home. Can’t seem to do both. When the bridge is on the mesh wifi, we can’t link our Hue account to our Alexa account.
Ugh that sounds frustrating! Thanks for highlighting it, there are more than a few niggles in the Hue-Alexa integration!
When I ask alexa to turn on living room lights it does but instead of just normal bright color it goes through the entire spectrum of colors over and over until I change it manually in the hue app. Only living room does this. I’ve tried changing setting and deleting scenes but nothing seems to work.
Hmm, that sounds odd Patrick! Have you ever setup any Hue Lab Formulas? (You can check this under Automations in the new Hue app).
It almost sounds like the Hue Colorloop formula is running when you restart the bulb.
Make sure all your scenes are “unchecked” in the Alexa app, in other words go to your scenes in Alexa and de-select any ticked scenes (I assume the only scenes will be the ones with the name “in lounge”. 😉
Thanks for the tip Amar, I hadn’t considered that but it makes sense.
Hi
My trouble in the intregration Alexa – Phillips Hue was the Samsung SmartThings. Alexa detected lights throught SmartThings but not directly from Signify (Phillips Hue)
I resolved this deleting in SmartThings the lights and rescan devices from Alexa.
All work perfectly
Ooo that’s an interesting point/issue that you came across – yes, I can imagine Alexa getting confused between devices from both SmartThings and Hue. Thanks for pointing this out, and mentioning how you resolved it.
May have found a better solution for Issue #3. I’ve just found that the Alexa app sees Hue Labs formulas as “scenes”. Using the Hue Lab formula called “Scene Playlist” you can get a close approximation of an automation, just with a few less options and you are limited to 4 scenes (but you still get transitions). Then you can make an Alexa automation to turn on that “scene” and it triggers the “scene playlist” formula. Not truly triggering a Hue Automation but very close, and still gets that cool effect of slowly dimming/brightening/changing colors you get from true Automations.
Ooo you’re quite right, thanks shrew! That’s ultra helpful. I had tried to dig into this in the past, but my Hue lab formulas weren’t coming through to Alexa as scenes for some reason. I just checked and it is working well for me now. That’s awesome – being able to trigger Hue lab formulas from an Alexa routine will be a big help. I’ll look to do a YouTube video on this in due course, along with updating issue #3 of this article.