Turning On/Off a Fan in a room

This used to work: I had ceiling fans assigned to different groups/rooms, and when I said, "Alexa, turn on the fan," the fan that was in the same group as the Echo device I was speaking to would turn on.

However, it has suddenly stopped working as expected. Now it seems to just turn on a device with "fan" in the name, rather than the specific fan assigned to the room.

Should this work?

I can think of one or two issues that could be causing this....

I've had groups on the alexa side forget what stuff is part of the group. Usually, the group forgets what echo device is in the room, and I'm sure that would cause a similar issue.

I have a couple devices that are starting to have issues with determining which device is closer to the spoken command. I.E., I'll tell my bedroom echo to play something, and the song will start 30' away on the kitchen echo. Maybe my devices need to be dusted and cleaned? Maybe the microphones have degraded enough over time that they can't tell distance (So Alexa isn't sure what device you were closest too when the command was given)?

Sometimes, Alexa just does whatever the F she wants to do. I know that usually I can turn on/off the fan in my office or my light.... Usually that works fine. Now I have to say "Turn on Bill's Office Light" or it will turn on the light in the master bedroom across the house. (Totally out of earshot.... so I know it's not a dirty microphone issue)

To summarize: I'm about 48/48/4.
48% chance it's a microphone age/microphone dirty/hardware problem. 48% chance it's a amazon software issue somewhere in the Group / Cloud area. 4% chance it's technology gnomes that come out at night and mess up my sh*t.

[jay (support)]

I can think of one or two issues that could be causing this....

+1

In terms of repeatability, you expect that software and services will produce the same result result given the same set of inputs. With Alexa, that has never really seemed to be the case (and products adding AI into the mix will make this much more widespread I think). The other thing that seems to do this is Xcode with compiles. Matt and I (facetiously) call this nondeterministic compiles.

I've never been able to get that kind of group synchronization to work. OTOH, I had to change the wake word for an Echo Dot that's upstairs because it would often respond to "Alexa" when we're downstairs and 8' away from to our Polk React soundbar.