Making Alexa and your echo devices work for you.

                                                                      

If you are like me you have Amazon devices in your house. I have 10 echos in my house. When I moved to Home Assistant I found a skill to make them work for me.

I have an Echo plus, that was the first smart home device I ever owned. I have an Echo Show  in my room. My teenage son has one, my younger kids room has an echo kids. My kitchen has one. I have a three echo Flex around the house. Plus I got in early on the Echo Auto presale.

Initially we used them exclusively for asking questions and basic automations. Then came Home Assistant. I found this skill:

https://github.com/custom-components/alexa_media_player/wiki/Configuration

Which unlocked so many options and cool things you can do. I use the skill to announce things around my house. I can setup automations to give announcements and reminders and also mess with my wife and kids. All the devices have become an "intercom" system.

If you want to see how to install them there are guides all over Youtube to show you how to use it. I even have a view in Lovelace that has a GUI to say things on the fly.

You can put your text on the "Text to speech" line and hit send and it your Alexa device will say whatever you put there.

Prior to using Node Red I used yaml to make automations for our announcements and reminders:

Just put the name of your echo device were the dashes are. In this example it will make just say the message that you put next to "Message:"

if you need to know the name of your Alexa devices go to your developers tools and and call service tab. Look for "ALexa Media Players" and it will give you the devices you have synced with HA.

Here is the node red version with announce:

{{"message":"Its Tuesday, the garbage cans need to be taken out","data":{"type":"announce"}}

This hung me up for so long until I got help with the Data part. The sky's the limit of what you can do. The only funky thing is that some words are pronounced weird. 

I also use this as a makeshift intercom system in my house. 

Using the mini media card you can put text on the text to speak line. The echo device will say what you put on that line. Hit that triangle to the right and the device will say it.

Add a manual card and paste this in:

type: 'custom:mini-media-player' artwork: full-cover entity: media_player.CHANGE_ME_TO_YOUR_DEVICE icon: 'mdi:amazon' tts: platform: alexa enity_id: media_player.CHANGE_ME_TO_YOUR_DEVICE

Check your indentation or it won't work. The lines after TTS: are the only ones indented.

As you can see the sky's the limit of what you can do with this skill. I keep finding new ways to use it. Make sure if you like the skill go to this GitHub and maybe contribute to the cause:
         https://github.com/custom-components/alexa_media_player

I will put copies of the code on the HA yaml or node red code page at the top of the blog.

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