Alexa Skill Help (mp3 playback)

Hi all,

I’m hoping to get some help with what I think is a fairly simple alexa skill but I’m not a lambda coder so I’m a little stuck. I was thinking I could use the home assistant custom skill to add some custom commands to do what I want but I’m not sure where to start.

What I’m looking to do is utter something, doesn’t matter much as it will be triggered from a skill, play an mp3 that I host myself and have opened to the internet and let home assistant know that it’s playing and on which device. Then when I say Alexa stop, stop the mp3 and tell home assistant it’s stopped.

Alternatively if it’s possible, which it might not be would be to start the mp3 and then have the alexa app show that there is media playing, but I think that can only be done with the built in media sources like spotify, pandora, amazon music, etc.

The end goal is to play a white noise mp3 file on one or multiple echo’s at the same time (not whole home audio groups, just a couple dots playing independently) and have home assistant know where it’s playing.

There are a couple methods… I usually set my actions up as a script in HA and then have an Alexa routine “turn on” the script. HA scripts will appear in the Alexa app under Scenes.

Thanks, but I need to know how to play that local mp3 on Alexa, and the link you send which I looked into is only good for files less that 240 seconds. I’m looking to have it play for ~12 hours.

AFAIK, that’s not going to happen from a local file. The 240s limit is Amazon’s limit, not HA’s or AMP’s.

There are third party skill services like My Pod, Plex, and Emby that allow you to upload your files to their servers and they handle the streaming.

Which is why I am looking to make a skill that can do it. I have looked into Plex but it says a bunch of crap before it starts playing anything. I just want it to start.

Does anyone have any actual advice on how to add this to the home assistant skill instead of suggesting other things that I’ve already looked into and decided won’t work for my use case? I’m not looking for alternatives, I’m looking for help with the skill.