Use Amazon Alexa in HomeSeer

Would you like to use your voice to control devices with Alexa in HomeSeer? Then you can take your SmartHome solution to new heights by integrating Alexa from Amazon in HomeSeer.

Personally, I think this Alexa in HomeSeer is one of the most useful and fun things I have made in my homeautomation system. For example, when I come into a dark kitchen with hands full grocery, it is very convenient to talk to Alexa for turning on or off the light. See the video for demonstration of this.

But one of the disadvantages of Amazon Alexa is that she only speaks English, French, German and Chinese at this time (August 2018). However, I personally can live with this, but it makes it a little difficult to use for non-native speaking in these language, for example for small kids. In addition, all devices in HomeSeer must be named with English names (or the language Alexa is using) for Alexa to be able to list them.

To get the two systems to talk together and trigger events in HomeSeer I have used IFTTT between Alexa and HomeSeer. That way you can say, for example “Trigger goodnight” and then Alexa triggeres an event via IFTTT and puts my home in night mode. This is not described in this post.

Below you can see how to set Alexa to HomeSeer to turn on and off devices. In my setup I’m using Amazon Echo and HomeSeer HS3.

Amazon Alexa app

Start connecting your Alexa device to your network – I will not go into detail with this, but you can see more here.

Once you have connected to your wifi and registered in Amazon Alexa app you can move on.

Add Skill

In the app go to “Skill”.

Here you need to search for Home, select the one named HomeSeer.

Now you will see a login window for MyHS and here you must log in with your MyHS login, this you have created in HomeSeer, if not you can create it here.

When the skill have been added go to “Smart Home” in menu.

In this window select “Add Device”.

The process will add HomeSeer devices to Alexa, and it can that some time.

After this process is complete, it is now possible to turn on and off devices through Alexa. This can be seen as an example of the small YouTube clip that is at the top of this guide.

Now just speak to Alexa!