Alexa devices now occasionally says "Sorry im having trouble connecting to your simon says eu skill right now"

Configuration Voice Assistant
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1

Hi there,

Ive been running home assistant for several months and its been nothing short of perfect, but a few days ago i started getting issues with my alexa echo devices when playing back my locally stored audio files through Nabu Casa.

For example i have audio files as time reminders on the hour, but probably at least 1 in 4 of the times im being told “sorry, im having trouble connecting to your simon says eu skill right now”. If I click ‘Run Actions’, the audio file will play fine most of the time so there can’t be an issue with file access or the location name, but if i run the same automation several times eventually one says the sorry message!

Anyone else experienced this? Its rather frustrating as it works most of the time, so makes it very hard to diagnose where the problem is. Im fully updated, performed numerous restarts to Home Assistant, logged out and back into the cloud… any other ideas?

Thanks in advance!

2

There are a couple of threads about this sort of thing - for example:

Possibly some sort of timeout caused by network activity (Google Assistant sometimes has a similar issue)?

Perhaps you could try storing your audio files locally and using the Alexa Media Player custom integration to play them.

1 Like
3

I know I get this issue all the time with DUCKDNS its related to the platforms Alexa accepts certificates for. Possibly there has been a change or some kind of load balancing by Nabu Casa or Amazon that has introduced this intermitently.

II am still waiting for a way to get it working at all without that error on DUCKDNS.

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4

thanks mate, i saw that thread but assumed it wasnt the same issue as mines been fine for so long and now its not. I’ll look into using Alexa Media Player.

5

Thank you, nice to know im not the only one, i would expect loads to be having this issue just suddenly come up though if something had changed?

6

As I recall, it gives you TTS via your Echo devices as well, so you wouldn’t necessarily need audio files. I only stopped using it because of the extra dependency on the Internet (mine’s a bit flaky) - but presumably you have that anyway if you’re using simon says.

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7

I use the Alexa Media Player with TTS and it works well. I also use it in my UI so i can message people in other rooms via their Echo. (Telling kids something without having to drop in for call or announce to all devices, like “Turn down the sodding volume” or “Time for Bed turn off your tablet”)

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8

any news with that? i’m with DUCKDNS too
and stuck with the same thing
(maybe spotify failure to play with alexa and HA - is the same source of problem?)

9

I also get this. It seems to be related to the message payload but I can’t work out what. Anybody even looking at this?

10

I was getting this same message from Alexa. (I don’t use DuckDNS, I use NabaCasa). I told Alexa I was putting her in time out and unplugged it for a couple of minutes, plugged her back in and the problem disappeared. (Though first I made myself crazy trying to look for a Simon Says skill on my Alexa.)

11

I was getting this all the time. Turns out there were characters in the text it didn’t like. I can’t remember what but I had to remove them. May I suggest if people are getting issues they cut and paste the phrase that isn’t working here as (for me at least) it was dependant upon the text passed.

12

Hi Wizbowes, i cant be sure which automations it does it for as its only very rare these days since i switched to using DuckDNS, but all my code for the action is basically the same, with the following one being the most varied …(I have hourly reminders and on some hours there are varied recordings that play on random and it almost always works).

service: notify.alexa_media
data:
message: >-
<audio
src='https://atkinsresolutions.duckdns.org/local/alexa/clock3-{{range(1,
4)|random}}.mp3'/>
data:
type: tts
target: media_player.kitchen_echo_dot

13

Hey guys,
I was having the same issue, what worked now:

service: notify.alexa_media
data:
  message: >-
    <audio
    src='https://testing-rami.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/morning-adhkar-short2.mp3'
    />
  data:
    type: tts
  target: media_player.mhds_3_echo_dot
14

I was having this same issue.

I noticed that instead of saying ‘and’, I had ‘&’ which the service did not like and would freak out about.

Changing it to ‘and’ fixed my text to speech issues

15

I can confirm that it the “&” symbol. I was having HA announce on alexa when a meeting in my Office 365 calendar is about to start.

I had to strip out special character in case there was an & in the meeting name

Mark, you have a meeting called {{ ns.summary | regex_replace("[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]", "") }}
            starting in 5 minutes
16

The Page seems to be not online any more.

Is there any other free Converter which is able to do this?
All I found isn’t working. :frowning:

THX

17

He started telling me this a few weeks ago. Although the sentences that worked before do not work now. It’s interesting(?) that the Alexa media player works through TTS, but through Nabucasa I get this “Simon say” error message.

18

Just use ffmpeg to convert your files. Here’s the command:

ffmpeg -i <input-file> -ac 2 -codec:a libmp3lame -b:a 48k -ar 24000 <output-file.mp3>
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19

Just use ffmpeg to convert your files. Here’s the command:

ffmpeg -i <input-file> -ac 2 -codec:a libmp3lame -b:a 48k -ar 24000 <output-file.mp3>

This one was helpful! Thanks for sharing!!!