Alexa Media Player 4.13.4 censorship?!?! WTF?

Third party integrations
1

I installed the latest version of home assistant 2024.10.1 and the latest version of Alexa media player and my automation “kind of” stopped working. I have a presence sensor next to my computer that counts in minutes from the time I have sit on the computer to the time I leave and if exceeds over 65 min I have Alex Echo speak to me “You’ve been sitting on the computer for too long. Move your ass! Take a break”

Now every time I get a reminder to move around i hear BEEP where the ASS used to be!?!? WTF? Why??

Here is the automation in case anyone wonders.

alias: "Office: Take a break"
description: ""
mode: single
triggers:
  - entity_id:
      - binary_sensor.computer_presence_sensor
    for:
      hours: 1
      minutes: 5
      seconds: 0
    from: "off"
    to: "on"
    trigger: state
conditions:
  - condition: state
    entity_id: sensor.alexphone_wifi_connection
    state: AkeNet
  - condition: not
    conditions:
      - condition: state
        entity_id: media_player.plexdesktop
        state: playing
actions:
  - data:
      message: " You've been sitting on the computer for too long. Move your ass! Take a break"
      target:
        - media_player.echo_office
    action: notify.alexa_media
  - data:
      message: " You've been sitting on the computer for too long. Move your ass! Take a break"
      title: "Health alert:"
    action: notify.hassagent
  - data:
      title: "Health alert:"
      message: " You've been sitting on the computer for too long. Move your ass! Take a break"
    action: notify.mobile_app_alexphone

Does anyone knows how and why and since when this censorship is amended and how to fix it? I want to be able to say whatever I want, not BEEPS!!!

2

There should be a pinned post about that update

3

Hi alexvaltchev,
That is an Alexa setting somewhere, you would have to research it.
Home Assistant doesn’t do that.

4

I found the pinned post but is about the previous version not working. Mine is working fine, it just censor’s words. In version 3.13.3 and lower it did not censor “bad words”. @Sir_Goodenough I found only “explicit filter” for music and podcasts. Nothing in the settings that I can see. Can you point me to where it is?

5

uh, so I make alexa swear all the time, they may have just added ass to the list of swear words. To get her to swear…

fu'ck
b'itch
sh'it

you get the idea. I just do a find/replace on the string to get her to swear.

Details here:

2 Likes
6

well I dont have much experiance with other “bad words” so I dont know if ASS was just added to the list as it is my only “profanity”. Just tried “a`ss!” and it worked kind of fine… Thanks

7

Np, you may have switched regions. Swear words have typically been censored, if you look at the commit history on that file, it’s old. I’ve needed to “translate” these words for quite some time.

8

no, I dont have a knowledge of changing the region. Did not touch anything. Must be Amazon internal change. I only updated home assistant and Alexa Media Player. Ass was fine before.

9

Yeah, Ass typically has been, I don’t have it in my list of translations. I’ll check when I get home

10

I have been using an almost identical automation.
I have had to change my word for ass to arse, or tuchus, bumm, and a host of many random words for your back side. Set it up to use the random words so I don’t get bored.

1 Like
11

I’m still running old Alexa media player and ass is censored. Not sure when this happened

12

Noob here, sorry… but how can I get her to swear again? I’m not understanding what I need to do. :frowning:

13

How do you make it give a “random” response from different sentanses?

14

Not near my system for a few days, but in yaml messges there is a way to create random sayings.

I usd this thread to get me started.
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/how-to-create-multiple-phrases-to-send-at-random-to-tts/19807

15

yep… this started doing the same thing for me a few days ago.
Have motion sensors that kick on the lights for driveway.

She used to say. “Wake yo ass up and do the hokie pokie… someone is in the driveway!!”
Now I get a bleeped noise.

Thought it was a joke at first, had to get her to repeat it a couple times to make sure I wasn’t hearing things.

No clue how to make her say the correct words again.

QUICK UPDATE:
Changed ‘ass’ to asss’ and she is back to normal. Sounds pretty much the same for that word.