Set Up Alexa Voice Control
Get a customer's installation ready, walk them through linking their Amazon account, choose which entities Alexa sees, and confirm voice control works.
Alexa voice control lets a homeowner operate their Home Assistant devices by voice, from anything with Alexa built in — an Echo, the Alexa app, a Fire TV, or a speaker you may already be specifying for the job such as the Sonos Era 100 .
Directives travel from Amazon to Selora Connect and down the existing tunnel to the hub, so there is nothing to configure on the customer’s router and no per-customer skill to author.
This page covers the parts you own: confirming the installation is ready, exposing the right entities, and verifying the result. For the homeowner’s own instructions, see Alexa Voice Control .
What You Can and Cannot Do
Linking is the homeowner’s action. It binds their Amazon account to their Selora account, so it has to happen on their device, signed in as them. You cannot link on their behalf, and you should not ask for their Amazon credentials.
Everything either side of that is yours. Confirming the plan, getting the hub online, choosing which entities are exposed, running discovery, and verifying the link all sit with you.
Check the Prerequisites
Work through these before you involve the homeowner. Each one causes a failure that looks like something else if you skip it.
| Requirement | Where to check | If it is wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Plan is a paid plan | Installation page → Plan | Voice control is unavailable on Free. The customer needs to move to a paid plan before linking will work. |
| Hub is online | Installation page → Services | Linking may succeed, but every command fails. Get the hub online first. |
| Entities exposed to Alexa | Home Assistant → Settings → Voice assistants → Expose | Discovery returns an empty list, which reads to the customer as “it doesn’t work”. |
| Customer is in the US or Canada | — | Alexa voice control is not available in other regions yet. |
Choose Which Entities Alexa Sees
Alexa only ever sees what Home Assistant exposes to it. Set this before the homeowner runs discovery — it is much easier than explaining later why the guest bathroom fan is in their Alexa app.
- In Home Assistant, go to Settings → Voice assistants → Expose.
- Select the Alexa assistant.
- Add the entities the customer should be able to speak to, and remove the ones they should not.
New entities are exposed to Alexa by default. On installations with a large or noisy entity registry, turn that off first and add entities deliberately.
Give every exposed entity a name the customer would actually say. Alexa matches on the Home Assistant name, and most “Alexa doesn’t understand me” reports are a naming problem rather than a voice problem.
Walk the Homeowner Through Linking
Stay with them for this — it takes about a minute and the failure modes are easier to catch live than over email.
- In the Alexa app: More → Skills & Games.
- Search for Selora, open the skill, tap Enable To Use.
- They sign in with their Selora Connect credentials.
- If their account has more than one home, the linking screen asks which one. Confirm they pick the right one. This is the step that goes wrong on multi-property customers, and it is not free to get wrong: one Amazon account controls one home, so re-linking later switches the skill to the other home rather than adding it. A customer with two properties needs a second Amazon account for the second one.
- They tap Allow Alexa.
- Say “Alexa, discover devices”, or use Devices → + → Add Device → Discover Devices.
Discovery takes up to a minute.
Confirm It Worked
Open the installation in Selora Connect and look at the Services section. The Alexa tile reports what Connect knows:
| Tile says | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Linked | An Amazon account is bound to this home. The tile names who linked it and when. |
| Not linked | The plan includes voice control, but no account has completed linking. |
| Not included | The plan does not include voice control. |
A household can link several Amazon accounts to one home, and the tile lists each one. That is expected for couples and families, not a duplicate to clean up. Each of them signs in with the same Selora account during linking — only a home’s owner can authorize it.
The tile records what was linked, not what Alexa is still using. Amazon sends no notification when a customer disables the skill, so a linkage the customer has abandoned keeps showing as Linked until someone clears it. Confirm with a spoken command before treating the tile as proof.
Then confirm with an actual command. A tile that says Linked proves the account binding, not that the hub answered.
Troubleshooting
Discovery returns nothing. Almost always exposure. Check Settings → Voice assistants → Expose in Home Assistant before looking anywhere else. If entities are exposed and discovery is still empty, check that the hub is online in Selora Connect.
Linking fails with an access error. The customer signed in to a Selora account that does not own the home they picked. Have them check which account they are signed in as.
Commands fail but the tile says Linked. The binding is fine and the hub is not answering. Check the hub is online and that Home Assistant itself is running.
A device the customer added is missing. Run discovery again. Alexa does not pick up new entities on its own, and neither adding an entity in Home Assistant nor exposing it triggers a refresh.
The customer wants voice control off. They unlink the skill in the Alexa app: More → Skills & Games → Your Skills → Selora → Disable Skill. It takes effect immediately. There is no switch in Selora Connect, deliberately — Amazon owns that state, and a second control here would be a second source of truth for it.
Last modified September 21, 2026: docs(alexa): add homeowner and installer guides for voice control (3795b7e)