Expose a persistent unique ID for learned devices per house model

Product Wishlist
1

Today, Sense learns new devices and assigns them a unique name. Sense requires that owners change the name of learned devices to help Sense learn what they are. In the process, owners are forced to lose the original unique identifier for the device. With the volatility of device learning, devices disappearing, stop reporting, and device loads moving from one learned device to another, owners are required to constantly rename these devices to try and keep track of what they are, and were, as they change. As a result, we can easily lose track of the original unique device name, and it’s history.

The name, make, and location text strings are the only place in the app that owners can record and remember what they’ve learned about the devices. In the name field I’m currently trying to record the original name, the device name/s and loads, and what appliances I’ve proved are not this device (Please see a previous request to add a notes field for each device in the app to avoid overloading the name field). This overloads the function of that field and interferes with how Sense uses it.

Please have a persistent identifier for each learned device so that it’s possible for us to keep track of what they started out as, and their history, without using the name or some other field.

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…change the name of learned devices to help Sense learn what they are.

There’s obvious utility to the user to assign useful names to identified things, and the emails from Sense say “You can help Sense get better by tracking down mystery devices and renaming them”, but is there any actual evidence, user experience, or specific assertion from the company that the name of a device has any influence on anything other than as mnemonic for user, and if so, what and how?

My Sense has been running ~5 weeks. In the first 4 weeks it only identified “Unnamed heat #1”, which is not a device – it’s triggered by half a dozen different things. I can’t fathom how Sense could parse names and learn anything – if I call it “various stuff” or “kettle and toaster and microwave…”, will ML magic do something? Of course if humans were reviewing the assigned names, that’s different, but I don’t see any indication that’s the case.

In the last few days, my Sense identified 5 “Unnamed motors”, but at first glance they don’t appear to correlate to individual items either, although I have not yet studied it super closely, and since I don’t think the names have any effect on it, I’ve been in no rush.