Maybe this is old news in your country or maybe it’s not even out yet but here in the UK Amazon has just launched their “Routines” feature.
This allows you to set a trigger phrase and associated actions directly in the Alexa app (no need to build a skill). Now when I say “Alexa, Goodnight” it turns off a number of lights (using the Emulated Hue Bridge).
I’m sure there are a ton of uses for this even just to make voice commands sound more natural.
Am I just an miserable sod, but I wasn’t impressed by this at all… We were able to do this via HA a long time ago, scripts etc
nope you were not.
without skills before you could say
alexa turn on nighttime
alexa turn off all lights
or with skills
alexa tell home assistant goodnight.
but if you said
alexa goodnight
alexa goodmorning
alexa i am home
she just would response with some text but you couldnt program her to do anything with that text.
i am sad that it isnt available in germany yet, but i hope it will come soon.
ahhhhh thanks for clearing that up. Makes more sense now. Cheers
I was pretty excited by this because the wife couldn’t wrap her head around “Alexa, turn on good night” to trigger the good night script. Now we can say “Alexa, good night”, and have it trigger the script. Add in the fact that Alexa is now room aware and we can trigger the room lights by just saying “Alexa, turn on lights”, and this is the most excited I’ve been about an Echo update.
It’s worth mentioning that I had trouble the first time as I’d put “Alexa, good night”. I had to change it to “Alex, goodnight” (goodnight as one word) to get it to work.
in germany i can create the routine, but i still cant activate it by speach.
i didnt know room awareness was also already there.
how do you connect a device to a room? (maybe not yet activated here?)
oke, through making groups. got it.
to bad that you cant use the same name twice for a group
Where is “routines” located in the app? I can’t find it under smart home!
I have tried the routines and I cannot add my bedroom lights as a smart home device action. It says the device is not available is it because it’s seen as a dimmable light in the alexa app?although it’s not a dimmable lighton HA.
Hmm. This feature must not be available for me yet. Thank you!
i also had some devices that were not recognized.
after that i deleted and rediscovered all devices some were usable. some others are still not usable.
i needed to buy a new smartphone to use this.
i had only an android 4.4 phone.
then i created some routines like
“Alexa, i am going to bed”
and they did work fine.
and then some stopped working and she responded differently.
sometimes i am really sure that i am talking to a woman 
then i thought, lets make my dumb TV smart.
i did make the remote buttons from my TV remote (1, 2, 3 …) available
i created routine and then the horror starts.
if i speak out something like RTL she hears r.t.l.
but you cant use a dot in the routines.
so i used another name for it and i got her to understand me.
the added actions > one and six
she did it but switched to channel 61
i did change the order in the routine
she switched on 116
tried again and she switched to 61
if i activate the routine in the app she switches on 16
tried again with speech and she switched to 61 again.
so it could be so nice, but it still needs a lot of work.
Is it still working?
I use alexa routines for a ton of stuff. They work, you just need to get the most recent alexa app on your phone. They even added routines to play music and such recently.
I just wish when the added the ability to play music they would have also added the ability to stop playing music. I would be nice to have a goodnight routine that played something relaxing and have it turn off after a certain amount of time or a in bed routine and then turn music off with a goodnight routine. Hopefully they will add more.
@kfgoode
How about just create a emulated hue that triggers a timmer/automation to turn off the media_player thats playing the music, or just a rule that turns off the media player if Xsource is playing after a certain time of day?
That works if you’re playing the music through any device except for the Echo. For some reason, that can’t be automated. I believe that’s what @kfgoode is referring to.
My bad, I got so many Dots I prefer to listen to music on my media players. The media players sound so much better! 
