I just wanted to mention this - If you’ve got an Amazon Alexa and you’ve already set up SSL and dynamic DNS (@brusc has a great tutorial here) , you should really give the Amazon component a try. You’ve already done the hard part. Once you see how it works and do some initial setup, it’s really easy to do your own thing.
Some stuff that I was able to create quickly:
- Ask Home Assistant to wake up [NAME] - I used the ideas from the script demo from the forum and made a wakeup script for each family member
- Ask HA what song is playing - A bit of templating combined with info from media_player. Reply comes directly from the Alexa
- Ask HA to play [playlist name] - similar to my “play random songs” post but with control over what playlist loads (using if/else in templates to pick the right playlist to load)