norcoscia wrote:I get the sense that all of the words used to start an action group are all just starting the action group
Correct.
norcoscia wrote:My question is on the words arm and disarm - not clear on how these could be equivalent, unless it is some sort of toggled action group…
They are there to allow a more natural language flow to arm and disarm actions. The utterances (what Amazon calls the speech part that represents what's said after 'tell indigo' invocation) are hard coded in the Alexa skill definition, and they must be action words (verbs) before the 'slot' that represents the freeform field used to collect the action group name. You could of course say
tell Indigo to set "alarm to armed",
set being the verb, but that felt somewhat unwieldy as the only way. Adding
arm and
disarm as verbs allows the user to create a more natural feeling phrase.
These options are meant solely to allow for users to create natural sounding/feeling directives to Indigo. They are not meant to be logical stand ins for "run" or "execute". Designing voice interaction requires that you enable a wide range of speech patterns because humans don't use the same exact pattern to communicate the same idea.