Alexa travel reminder

Configuration
1

Hi all, I’m just getting into Home Assistant, and I’m really enjoying this site. I’ve been getting lots of ideas from the community!
My question is about linking man Amazon echo to the Google travel times API. I have google travel times set up as a sensor, and it lists my morning commute time at the top of my home assistant frontend. What I would really like to do is use this information to give an auditory reminder of when I should leave. Basically I want my Hass to say “you should leave now to arrive at work by 8:30”, based on what the Google travel time returns. And since the Amazon echo can be used as a Bluetooth speaker, I’d output the sound through it.
Is this possible? I am especially hoping to avoid going through the AWS lambda page that was necessary for Haaska. That was a mess.
Thanks in advance for any help or guidance you can offer!

2

I do this using the android app lannouncer. I run it in the background on a wall mounted tablet that is permanently connected to my echo as a bluetooth speaker. The app retrieves commands by curl which can be set up as a shell command in hass and will read text to speech. Here’s an example of my config

shell_command:
  announce: 'curl "192.168.1.5:1035/?SPEAK={{ speak ]]&@DONE@"

Then I can fill in the message dynamically depending on the automation,

So in your case you would set up the trigger based on google travel times, and your action would be:

action:
  service: shell_command.announce
  data:
    speak: You should leave now to arrive at work by 8:30.

And this will cause the app to read out your message through your echo speaker.

There may be other ways to do this, but this is a pretty simple solution to make alexa speak to me unprompted. You can also use the maker channel on ifttt to send off these curl commands, for example if you receive an email or something.

2 Likes
3

Ah, that’s very clever. Could you explain your first block of code a little bit more? Is the IP address that you are curl-ing the address of your android tablet?
I am guessing you did it this way because Iannouncer doesn’t run on a Raspberry Pi?
Thanks for your help.

4

Thanks, I’m quite happy with this set up.

Yes I did it this way exactly for this reason. I have the android tablet there anyway, and lannouncer only runs on android. I couldn’t find any other solution as elegant.

Yep, that address is the ip of the tablet and the port that is exposed from lannouncer.

I can also call on this service from IFTTT with the maker channel, and fill in the blank with any source received from a trigger, so if for example I send a text message to my IFTTT phone number, lannouncer will read it out. This also means it can read anything from twitter, email, or can be used to make announcements based on sensors that IFTTT has, but HA doesn’t, such as a new gmail being received. Makes it great for notification purposes.

5

I noticed in another post, found here,

Someone was able to get HASS to speak using a shell command. Specifically, I am looking at the second block of code in the first post of the above thread. Would that accomplish the same thing as what you suggested?