I sat down one night to try to figure out how to setup schedules and routines in Alexa. There was nothing simple or intuitive about it. It has a long way to go before it’s user friendly for more than the attendees at a Star Trek convention.

It's literally four steps. Routines is listed in the main menu. Control4's When>Then paradigm is the only traditional control system entry that comes close, and it's far more involved. And it requires a 4Sight subscription.

Sean, Fins is able to implement four steps. Don't insult him.

Where are those steps listed? Are they written down somewhere? Do you find them easily in the app?

Not sure how you construed anything I wrote as an insult.

In the Alexa app help menu there’s a section that walks through routine creation.

Or a video: 

Sean - what are you doing now? You mentioned that you were in resi for 14 years until recently?

Just curious. Always working on the long game.

I agree it's getting pretty robust. However, for the typical non-tech customer, many of them don't have the focus to speak the exact routine the correct way.

I'm just waiting for Alexa to become smart enough to interpret a sentence spoken multiple ways.

So it can interpret all these the same:

Open the upper shades
Upper shades up
Raise the upper shades
Can you open the upper shades
Raise up the family room uppers
Open the upper family room shades
Open the friggen upper shades

Will Alexa become a grammar witch -- commenting on poor grammar? Then there will be the question of should this "correct" grammar be the Queen's English or not.