Hi there,
I put this into uncategorised. Didn’t find a better one. I am new with HA. As we are used to use Amazon Alexa, I would like to integrate it.
I found two options so far, AWS and NabuCasa. The yearly costs of NabuCasa are five times as high as I think it suitable. It’s the costs of a streaming service, just without streaming any content.
It’s already weird to use the cloud to exchange data, that could stay inside the house. So I let’s get it more weird.
Make them human
It’s all about how to connect Alexa, which is a quite closed system, unless you want to go via AWS. But there are some in-house interfaces. The last one I would think off, are the human-computer interfaces to connect two computers, speech and graphics. So let’s treat them them first.
Speech for now. Both HA and Alexa are capable to do TTS. So it should be possible to speak to each other. HA can trigger Alexa and Alexa can trigger HA. Once triggered half of the job is done. In the simple case, you could also send the payload:
HA: "Alexa! Broadcast It's getting windy outside. Please close all windows and doors."
I tested the communication with HA generated TTS. It works well.
Once triggered you may be able to use a skill to query data by an in-house URL. I didn’t go deeper into this so far. Any experiences?
Use the ZigBee interface: ventilator in the attic
It should be able to use the ZigBee interface to trigger Alexa. HA starts a ventilator in the attic to generate motion. A Zigbee motion sensor triggers an Alexa skill. It’s by intend a crazy solution. Hope you come up with a more simple one.
More ideas
Do you have more ideas how to connect Alexa by weird hacks?