I think we need an updated Alexa custom skill that just passes the spoken text directly to the conversation service. It seems like this service has made managing sentences/utterances in a custom Alexa skill a bit redundant. I would much rather just capture the raw spoken text and let the HA conversation service execute an appropriate action and reply. This is something that I’ve been doing with Alexa and HomeSeer since about 2016 and am trying to re-create in HA.
Reasons I want to use Alexa to interact with HA Assist:
- Already heavily invested in Alexa hardware.
- Still want other features of Alexa, such as general web queries, direct music playback, etc.
- Alexa’s voice recognition works better than anything else I’ve tried. In my personal, anecdotal experience.
An Alexa skill like I’m proposing would offer the best of both worlds and effectively allow Alexa devices to almost act like native HA Assist speakers.
I say “almost” because having to say “tell home assistant” would be a less-than-native experience (but worth it for me). You could also customize the skill invocation name. I use a different, one-word skill name for my custom HomeSeer skill.