Alexa integration with HA

Configuration Voice Assistant
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#1

Hello beautiful people,

I’m going to be integrating Amazon Alexa with Home assistant.
Firstly, I’d like to ask is alexa integrating with home assistant or home assistant integrating with alexa?

Secondly, I have a few echo devices, so my question is should I connect zigbee devices to echos and then integrated alexa with HA. Alternatively, I also have mqtt running so should I connect zigbee devices to mqtt? Which method is easier, better?

Third question kinda links in with the second. The zigbee devices which are connected to alexa, will they show up in HA? If so should I leave them be, or connect them to mqtt? Is there a benefit either way?

Tank You :slight_smile:

#2

You really need to integrate it in both directions for full control using two different approaches. To integrate Alexa into Home Assistant, the best way is the Alexa Media Player custom component:

This will bring your Alexa devices into Home Assistant, so you can control their volume, do not disturb settings, routines, and make announcements using text to speech through them.

To integrate Home Assistant devices into Alexa in that direction - ie you tell Alexa to turn a Home Assistant connected switch on, the best way would be Home Assistant Cloud aka Nabu Casa and the Home Assistant Alexa Skill

No, they will be difficult to control that way and cloud dependent. You ideally want to get a zigbee USB stick, and then bring your zigbee devices into Home Assistant using ZHA.

Or if you need advanced options and want mqtt, zigbee2mqtt.

If you have Home Assistant cloud, your zigbee devices integrated to Home Assistant would then be connected to Amazon. There is a small monthly fee for the cloud, and initial one time fee to buy the zigbee stick (recommended ones here Supported Adapters | Zigbee2MQTT ) - but to get local control of the zigbee devices it is worth it.

If you use the Amazon device as your zigbee hub, you could control the zigbee devices by setting up Amazon routines and using the Amazon Media Player skill to trigger those routines to turn those zigbee devices on and off, but you will not get status of those devices in Home Assistant. For example, if you turn it on through Home Assistant, but you turn it off through Alexa, Home Assistant would have no idea if the switch/device was on or off. Therefore, I wouldn’t recommend trying to integrate zigbee devices directly connected to Alexa to Home Assistant.

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#3

@mwav3,

is there a way to bring the Alexa sub-devices to HA, not only the Echo speakers?
I have a radio frequency “blackout internal curtain” (Mottura brand), controlled via Alexa with a Broadlink RM4 Pro + that I would have into HA.

Thanks in advance!

#4

@Cupra1979

You would be much better off bringing the Broadlink Device into Home Assistant and controlling it directly that way.

Ideally you want to connect everything you can locally - which is the primary benefit of using Home Assistant.

You can control Alexa connected devices using the custom component I linked above by creating routines in the Alexa App - https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=G2PYLKJN3XVZ55EQ . You generally would create an “on” routine and “off” routine for your device(s). Then using the custom component you can activate the routine through Home Assistant by following these directions - Home · custom-components/alexa_media_player Wiki · GitHub

I have an Amazon branded Smart Plug I can control this way. However, as I mentioned above, you can’t get the status of any device this way - you can just trigger the routine to turn it on or off, and it is cloud dependent. No internet, or an Amazon cloud outage, and it won’t work

3 Likes
#5

Damn! Thanks Tim.

That’s a lot of info I need to absorb. But you answered every query I had :slight_smile: :slightly_smiling_face:

Once I dig into this, I’m sure I will have more questions for you :wink:

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