In my Alexa setup, I usually only need to say “Alexa, activate <scene name>” to make it work. I find I have to name my scenes a bit carefully. Including the words “on”, “off” or “lights” in the scene name seems to confuse her when she’s trying to figure out what to do. For example, I have a scene called “Kitchen Night” (and yes, manually triggered), and I can very reliably get her to run it with the “Activate Kitchen Night” request. But the “Kitchen Off” scene was hit or miss.
FWIW, my “Kitchen Night” scene is also automatically run by Reactor when all kitchen lights are turned off (and stay off for 15 seconds) during my designated “Evening” period. This basically turns the undercabinet lights on at a night-light level until my “Night” period takes effect (during sleep hours). At that time, all the lights are turned off completely, unless I have the “Guest Mode” or “Party Mode” virtual switches on. With Guest Mode, one section of undercabinet lights are held on throughout the night, in case our guest visits the kitchen during the night (our guest room is on the same level as the kitchen and pretty close to it, so it keeps them from coming out of the guest room into a completely dark house). With Party Mode on, all normally-scheduled turn-off of lights is prevented, so we don’t get the “last call” effect at what is normally bedtime. Can’t end the party too soon, right? Anyway, the Guest Mode and Party Mode virtual switches are the ones I was referring to earlier as being easy to operate from Alexa. I also have a “Night Mode” virtual switch, which puts the house into the bedtime mode early if we happen to close up well before the normally-scheduled automatic start time for Night mode.
People have done much more interesting things with Reactor than this, IMO, but I do “eat my own dog food” as they say, and try to push on it as hard as I can in my own environment.
