I am interested in the new HA cloud to use Alexa. It looks like I will be able to issue commands to Alexa such as “turn on bedroom lights” but is it possible for an automation in HA to send a message to Alexa to notify me of an event?
For instance if I’m watching TV and the garage door opens unexpectedly, I can send a notification to my phone like I do now but also send it to Alexa to have it say something like “Unauthorized access to the garage”?
Not directly. You can have the audio to play in a Pi and the Pi connected to the Echo via Bluetooth so that the audio will come out from the echo.
Ok that I can do, thanks.
I guess if the Echo is already connected to a Bluetooth Sound Bar then this method is not going to work since the Echo can’t connect to more than one BT device? I’ve seen one video where a guy had his echo playing on multiple BT speakers but he had to buy 3.5mm to BT adapters.
You may want to check out a github that I found last week and have started using.
It allows you to programatically create reminders on one of your Echo devices which in turn will speak the text provided. It’s limited but I’ve found it to be very useful.
The downside is every announcement begins with, “This is a reminder…”
I run another of his repos
I run it on my iMac and send the curl requests from Hassio to it for announcements. I added a bit to it so you can pass on specific times as well as instantly have it make the reminder announcement.
create_alexa_alert: curl -X POST -d "reminder={{ the_message }}" -d "date={% if the_date %}{{ the_date }}{% else %}{{ (as_timestamp(states.sensor.date__time.last_changed) | int + 70) | timestamp_custom('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M') }}{% endif %}" http://192.168.1.108:8091/alexa-reminders
If I pass the_date then it sets it up for the future if I don’t it reads it a minute later.
I also have Polly setup to make announcements but actually prefer this method. If you try it out and have questions let me know. I’ve been working on my first Hassio add-on for this exact purpose but am finding it challenging but understand the method to this pretty well.
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