Thanks for sharing your experience! I have actually mostly been testing with a good desk mic, and expect recognition to get worse with room mics… The hardware I bought are seeed ReSpeaker mic arrays, I am somewhat hopeful about them.

Adding a lot of alternative sentences does indeed help, at least to a certain degree. However, my issue is less with “it should recognize various different commands for the same action”, and more “if I mumble, misspeak, or add a swear word on my third attempt, it should still just pick the most likely intent”, and that’s what’s currently missing from the ecosystem, as far as I can tell.

Though I must conceit, copying your strategy might be a viable stop-gap solution to get rid of Alexa. I’ll have to pay around with it a bit more.

That all said, if you find a better intent matcher or another solution, please do report back as I am very interested in an easier solution that does not require me to think of all possible sentence ahead of time.

Roger.