Alexa-Notify-Bridge: Persistent yellow ring notifications for your Echo devices

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Hi everyone!

Since I started using Home Assistant, I’ve been trying to find a way to send persistent notifications to my Alexa devices. Until now, I’ve been using Alexa Media Player and the official integration, but they only read the notification out loud at the exact moment it triggers. If you’re not in the room or don’t hear it, the notification is lost forever.

For example, I would have an automation saying “The washing machine has finished”, but if I wasn’t around to hear it, the wet clothes would just sit there. I know you can also send notifications to your phone or loop the TTS every X minutes, but the repeating announcements get quite annoying.

I’ve always wanted to use Alexa’s native notification feature: it makes a small chime and the LED ring pulses yellow until you ask, “Alexa, what are my notifications?”. Then she reads them out to you. But unfortunately, there wasn’t an easy way to send custom text notifications from HA this way.

I was aware of the Notify Me skill, but it’s not available in my country (Spain), and I didn’t like the idea of routing my notifications through third-party servers anyway.

The other day, while playing around with AI and seeing how these new coding agents work, I thought: “Maybe it’s not that complicated to build my own solution with the help of AI”… so I went for it!

After spending some time refining the code, improving security, adding logs, and documenting the process, I think it turned out pretty well! I’ve decided to open-source it in case it’s useful to anyone else here:

:backhand_index_pointing_right: GitHub - R91g/Alexa-Notify-Bridge · GitHub

Main Features:

  • Easy to use: Just send a simple local HTTP POST request (via a HA rest_command) to generate a persistent notification on your Alexa account.
  • :spouting_whale: Dockerized: Ready to deploy in seconds with Docker Compose.
  • :locked: Privacy Focused: It doesn’t rely on third-party servers (other than Amazon’s own API). Your credentials stay securely on your local server.

I’ve also included a quick guide in the README on how to set it up with Home Assistant using a script wrapper, so it shows a nice text input box in the visual Automation UI.

Let me know what you think, and I hope you find it useful!