If you look at how some of our customers are using it, it demonstrates what is possible when there's not a pre-defined grammar, particularly in the area of queries. The issue isn't how many ways can you say turn the kitchen lights on. It's things way beyond lights and thermostats. There are so many commands or queries you might want to use. If you treat the Echo as what it is, a voice driven remote control, and let the smarts be in the automation system, then it's completely open ended. And they wouldn't have to give up the current scheme to do that, since it would just require allowing the user the option to say skill x is the default, and that one doesn't require the extra verbiage. That's allow it would take.
Then you can do anything you want, such as:
Alexa, is today's high temp greater than X
Alexa, how long till sunset
Alexa, what is the ground saturation percentage
Alexa, how many cars are in the garage
Alexa, what are the currently violated zones
Alexa, set the living room to party mode
Alexa, Bob is currently in vacation mode
Alexa, which rooms have active motion
Alexa, how many inches of rain fell in the last x days
Alexa, have music follow first floor rooms if active
Alexa, have the sprinklers run today
Alexa, set all bedrooms to music playlist x
and so on and so on, whatever you can come up with that might want to do. All of those things can be done with CQC's Echo support, though none of them are built in. You can just define what you want. Though of course now they require the extra 'tell CQC to' or 'ask CQC if' and whatnot. Some of those you could probably kludge by pretending that something is a light, but you shouldn't need that sort of kludge.
And of course the above leaves aside lots of potential specialized applications beyond basic home automation, i.e. commercial applications where quite specialized commands and queries could be needed.
