How do I get a voice brief of all devices that are in an on state on my echo from Home Assistant? Example: ME: “Alexa, Ask the house for status” … Echo: " the living room light is on, the tv is on, the porch fan is on, the kitchen light is on, the security tv is on.
Christapher, like I mentioned in my other response. You will need to construct the text of your report in an automation, or node red or something else. You don’t need an integration or add in to do that part.
The text can be built with templates (you could select all devices in a specific domain (switch, light, etc.) in a specific state. Look at this thread for information on how: Doors Open/Unlocked/People Home Template Help
Once you do, setup Alexa Actionable Notifications using Alexa Media Player (available in HACS) to trigger your automation that will feed your templated report into the Alexa voice response.
I still pretty new to Home Assistant but did manage integrate Alexa with Home Assistant local without having the Nabu Casa subscription or the cloud version of Home Assistant & remote access to Home Assistant. The comment you made before seemed to point to these things “Look up Alexa Media Player in HACS. It gives you the ability to address the speakers. You’ll have to find a way to build your report then send it to the speaker you want through a script or routine” I am still VERY green behind the ears and either links like the one you provided above or video seem to be the only way I learn. I will look at the link you provided and if you have any other links for me that you think will help please let me know. Thank you so much!
So if I understand you correctly, I just need to set up a template listing all the devices I want the sate of ‘I only want my echo to tell me which devices are on’ and then setup Alexa Actionable Notifications using Alexa Media Player?
If I was setting this up I wouldn’t personally use the “Actionable Notifications” I would just use a standard automation with the Text-to-Speech Notification that comes from installing Alexa Media Player… while I do have a couple “Actionable Notifications” I found them somewhat difficult to muddle through at first. I only use those for pretty specific circumstances, ie: the side door gets locked but the garage is still open, she asks if we want the garage door closed, becausing locking the door signifies we are going in for some duration… but anyway.
I would start by creating groups for each of the similar items that you want to check the status of, doors, windows, people, etc… then play with the template in the thread referenced above by @NathanCu in the developer tools > template editor. You can just copy and paste the example in the template editor once your items are in groups and you should get some sort of phrase returned. Then I would just edit it to more closely suit your needs.
I will check my yaml to see what the final iteration of that was, but the first example should be a decent starting point to see how it works, and that would just be the the text to speech value_template for the Alexa Media Player notify service call. You could do it with actionable notifications, but that can be a whole-nother can of worms.
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I just got done creating the template for all my devices that I would want the status of and now I just got to figure out the Alexa Media Player. The information you gave like using Text-to-Speech Notification instead of Actionable Notifications will be very helpful! Thank You. Question: I was under the impression that if only one device was ‘on’ in the list of a ‘Group’ that it would consider everything in the group as on?
Depends on how you setup the group. There is an option for any members of a group or all members.
So, it could only list the ones it finds in the on state?
Terminology : Templates aren’t groups they’re a way to select one or more entities. Groups are a different animal.
Templates can use ‘filters’ to take a selection and filter them down. I you case you can filter for domain ‘light’ and / or ‘switch’ and then pass that result to another filter selecting ‘on’. There’s no limit to the filters although practically you can usually get what you want with three or fewer filters.
A ‘group’ is a roll up entity that reports on or off for the group as a whole and how it behaves depends on your specific setup.
You could even have a template that extracts the members of a ‘group’ and uses that to pass to a filter.
(throw away everything SmartThings taught you BTW - there’s multiple ways to do things. And the terminology suddenly matters because of it)
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