question

You can certainly supply Amazon with a list of device names. It's called a custom slot. However, I think that's what you mean by "hard coding". Is what you are really asking for "dynamic slots"? I.e. the ability to change the values in a custom slot on-the-fly, either as a periodic update that does not require certification, or on a per-user basis. If so, there are a few threads in Feature Requests already asking for this. You can go and +1 them if you like. Personally, I do not think this is something that Amazon will do. If you note, when you submit a new interaction model, it spins for a bit. That pauses is when it "compiles" your interaction model into the internal structures they use for parsing the audio stream. This is compute intensive and proprietary. The same delay would be incurred each time you change the interaction model. Therefore it isn't something practical to do on-the-fly. I have some hope that they will allow for periodic non-certified updates to custom lists. I have slimmer hope they will let you upload 2-8 additional interaction models that your skill can select among at run time. But I'm not holding my breath.

Correct; I didn't mean custom slots. It also wouldn't need to be completely dynamic - i.e. the list of devices changes infrequently, but it is per-user. I don't think it is technically impossible - the connected home API already works with custom device names, though the possible utterances seem less flexible there so maybe it works differently.

Trust me. It is technically impossible. At least for the 3rd party skills API. All we can hope for is a change...

jjaquinta is right, of course: no dynamic slots. Out of curiosity, why not use custom slots? They're going to be along the lines of: Living Room Dining Room Master Bedroom Bob's Room etc. If you have a lot along those lines, I bet you'll get pretty good results. Another option is to use account linking for the user to enter their blind names, store those, and then match their utterances against what you've stored. (You could even just collect this information "in-skill".) That said, I haven't looked at the connected home API, so maybe there's something specific to that to preclude these approaches.