Alexa Notification: Where all echo devices associated with an account will display a yellow indicator. A user must then invoke: “Alexa, read notifications.” to retrieve any notifications that have been sent.
Alexa Notifications are particularly useful when you want to ensure a message is not missed. Signalling hardware failures, water leaks, temperatures out of range, things that could have catastrophic results if action is not taken.
Currently to send Alexa Notifications requires the use of a 3rd party application, such as http://notifymyecho.com/. This application must be a Amazon Smart Home Skill. Once the skill is installed, it requires you to manually enable the skill to send notifications.
Initial thoughts were to integrate with Alexa Media Player, however Alexa Media Player is not a Smart Home Skill and cannot be authorized to send notifications.
Considering the “Amazon Alexa Integration” is already a Smart Home Skill, this seems like a good candidate for implementing Alexa Notifications.
Alexa Media Player’s notification uses TTS to play audio, at a point in time, through a specific Alexa device. This is not the same functionality I have requested.
Alexa API calls it a Notification. This is where you set the notification and it is persistent until a user clears it via, “Alexa, read notifications.”
While I would prefer to deliver if via Alexa Media Player, as it is not a core integration, however Alexa Media Player is not currently a Smart Home App / Skill and therefore cannot be enabled to send notifications. The Alexa Media Player implementation would need to be moved from a custom to smart home skill.
Alexa integration already exist, but the requirements is not standard setup for HA amd there is a lot of ways to achieve this setup, where everyone have specific pros and cons.
Some of the cons will be opening ports to the internet on your HA installation, which goes against many users view on security and it makes it harder to argue for it when it is for a cloud service, where HA proud itself of being the local solution answer to those services.
Alexa Integration does not provide this functionality, to my knowledge. I am asking for a feature specifically for Alexa Integration to provide said functionality.
FYI, I already have Alexa Integration, Alexa Media Player, and Notifymyecho.com with Restful trigger. I would like to not rely on Notifymyecho.com and have the functionality within Alexa Integration
I think I’m missing your point. For any skill to be authorized by Amazon to send / set notifications, your Smart Home Skill must be manually enabled to send notifications. You must go into the Alexa App on your device go to Skills, choose the skill you would like to enable to send notifications and then click enable.
If the it is not a Smart Home Skill, it will not show up in the Alexa App as a Skill to be allowed to send notifications.
Unless the Alexa Media Player lambda deployment is changed from a Custom to Smart Home Skill, it is not feasible for the Alexa Media Player to send / set notifications.
The way HA and Alexa is built it will never work.
The media player is just a media player.
You need the API to make a skill that then plays the sound you want on the Alexa media player.
The integration opens up to the Alexa API and from there you need to work on the AWS, which is outside of HAs domain.
This is the requirement of Amazon for Alexa skills.
Again I think I’m missing your point. The entire point of the feature request is to ask for that work to be completed. Unless you can show me otherwise, neither Alexa nor Alexa Media Player provide the functionality I’ve requested.
