Bug/Fix - Alexa Voice Duration Skill Integration, there is an Environment Crisis!

Alexa accepts the instruction "Alexa, turn on my hot water for 1 minute" and then turns on the hot water forever more ! Tado Alexa integration only recognizes the "Alexa, turn on my hot water" without the time constraint sub-clause (utterance). No warning, no nothing...

Opps - hot water all night!!! - Lots of expensive oil burnt, keeping it hot unnecessarily!

My Ask: Please can the TADO Skill simply recognize the time constraint sub-clause "utterance". I believe this is actually known as an 'intent'. It would be so useful, and very green !!

These might be of use:

https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/smapi/alexa-timers-guidelines-for-usage.html

https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/custom-skills/slot-type-reference.html#duration

Hope it helps. Many thanks James.

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  • Hi All,
    I don't understand why some of you are having this issue.....
    My Alexa voice command of "Alexa, set hot water to 46" will increase my HW setting to 46°.......and then the "tado° Room Manual Change timer (30mins) will return the HW setting back to the current Temperature Schedule.
    My setup works every time.
    I don't think you can instruct Alexa to control the timescale of operation, the length of operation is controlled by your settings in the tado° App.......as I said, it works perfectly for me.
  • JamesU
    JamesU ✭✭
    edited April 2022

    Hi @GrayDav4276

    So, for our boiler system, there is no hot water temperature thermometer. Hence we can simply have it on or off.

    Excluding planned on/off times - If we want a couple of showers (eg after a cold wet walk) and hot water left in the tank for later we'll need the hot water on for 30 mins before we need it, and for 30 minutes after. If we just need a dog wash - then 10 minutes would be enough to just warm it up. (Yes, over pampering, in my humble view!).

    Hence a skill that has the context of 'duration' would really useful. ie

    "Alexa, turn on my hot water for 1 hour"

    "Alexa, turn on my hot water for 10 minutes"

    (I now realise there is a timer setting on the manual control so at least I can be certain not to exceed some arbitrary time (eg 2 hours) , and so not have the hot water on all night, burning the expensive oil - sadly!)

    I am looking at IFTTT - useful, possibly, but this would be better built-in and supported in the future going forward by Tado directly. Eliminating any IFITTT issues, or API changes.

    Hope that helps.

    Many thanks - James

  • Looking back - this really could do with a title update to add ... Energy Crisis too!

    I think this is still a valid idea/innovation that would the easy to implement for TADO.