Amazon Alexa Guide: Adding, Removing and Syncing Your Devices

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When first setting up Amazon Alexa with Vera you can pick which devices and scenes Alexa will discover and be able to control. But should you change your mind and want some of them gone and no longer controllable through Alexa, or if, conversely, you have paired some new ones with Vera and want Alexa to discover them, you can easily make the proper adjustments at any given point later on.

Adjusting what Alexa has access to

**1. Access the Manage Alexa section at home.getvera.com**

Go to home.getvera.com and log in with your Vera credentials. In the upper right corner, click on the arrow sign to open the drop-down menu, and then select Manage Alexa.

2. Provide or revoke access for new or existing devices and scenes

This will take you to the same page seen when first linking Vera with Alexa. You can select the new devices or scenes you might've added in the meantime, or deselect particular ones. Click on Finish when done.

Syncing your devices

Once this is done, you need to put Alexa through the discovery process again to take in the new changes. You can do this from alexa.amazon.com but, luckily, also straight from the app, for added convenience.

By far the simplest method is telling Alexa to 'discover devices', which will in fact detect both new devices as well as scenes.

If for whatever reason you want to do it manually though, both the app and the web interface afford this option.

1. Manual Discovery Through the Web UI

Start off by heading to alexa.amazon.com, and log into your Alexa account there. Once in, go into the Smart Home section. You should see both the Devices and Scenes options.

They're both constructed the same way, consisting in a list of your devices/scenes, each device/scene having a forget button next to it for easy removal, and a Discover and Forget All button below.

While this is doubtlessly useful for forgetting a specific device or scene, when removing or scanning for scenes or devices in bulk, it applies to both scenes and devices, irrespective of the section you did it from. That is to say, in actuality Alexa will scan for and discover both devices and scenes at the same time, whenever it's put through the discovery process, and not just one of the two.

For example, if you proceed from the page above into Scenes, and click on Discover, once the process is complete, Alexa will have discovered not only new scenes, but also devices (depending, of course, on what you provided access to from Vera, as discussed above). The same applies to Forgetting: clicking on Forget All from either the Scenes or Devices section will forget everything, devices as well as scenes. In light of this, the Forget option for each individual device or scene is nice to have.

2. Manual Discovery Through the App

As mentioned above, the most straightforward way to go about this is to just tell Alexa to "discover devices." The point made above about the devices and scenes both being discovered at once no matter which section you send the command from stands for both the voice command and the manual one from the app.

The Alexa app, unlike the Web interface, doesn't offer the option of discovering new devices, while it does so for scenes. In keeping with the earlier point, this will actually detect scenes, but also devices—so this is the way to go when taking the manual route.

What you need to do is tap on the Scenes card in the card string at the top, within the Devices section, then click on Discover Scenes.

Note, however, that if you forget all of your scenes, you won't have a Scenes card, which rules out the possibility of discovering new devices this way.

Forgetting devices

Simply revoking access for a given scene or device won't cause it to disappear from the Alexa interface, and you need to actually forget—i.e. remove—it for good measure, for that to happen.

As already seen above, the alexa.amazon.com web interface lets you individually forget scenes as well as do it in bulk.

The app, on the other hand, only allows individual removal of scenes and devices, one by one. To do it, simply track down the device or scene you want removed, tap on it, then on the gear icon in the top right corner, again on the trash can icon on the new screen, and then finally choose delete.

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