by AdminWes » Thu Jun 01, 2017 7:03 am
Hi webminster,
The short answer is no.
The longer answer is there's a fundamental difference between how INSTEON works with scenes and how Alexa voice control works for dimming devices. Alexa doesn't have a concept of scenes provided by a partner. You can create scenes in the Alexa app, but this is really just an ON/OFF group. So for dimming, Alexa is assuming that the thing you are controlling is a device that can move to a specific percentage...like 50%.
INSTEON doesn't support dimming scenes to a specific percentage. INSTEON does support dim or brighten a scene and the scene generally moves in that direction by a few percentage steps overall, but what we find is you'd have to issue dim, dim, dim, dim, etc to get it where you want it. Not a great voice experience.
What we've done is we treat scenes like on/off devices to Alexa so you at least have some control over the scene, but we can't tell Alexa the scene is a dimmer device because then Alexa expects that the dimmer should respond to 50% ON or some specific on level which INSTEON scenes do not support.
A compromise solution is to create a scene with the devices dimmed to your levels and give it a voice name that makes sense to you. Usually with voice there's a scenario where it makes sense to activate a scene with dimmed lights like "TV mode" or "dinner time". Then saying "Alexa, turn on dinner time" will dim the lights to your scenario's need.
Hopefully this helps,
Wes