Hi folks, I repurposed an Echo Dot as an HA voice assistant today, using @JUL14N’s project here.
I’ve not used voice in HA before, so also followed this guide to help me setup TTS and STT, using Piper and Whisper.
The device is responding to voice commands and carrying out actions, but I get no voice feedback, either to commands or questions like “what time is it?”. Debug on HA looks fine, the voice prompt wav files are being generated and I can play them back in my browser.
Looking at debug on the Echo device itself, I can see the following problem:
2026-10-13 19:46:10.187 transcript: Turn the family room lights off.
2026-10-13 19:46:10.415 reply: Turned off the light
2026-10-13 19:46:10.415 media: announce https://<server>:8124/api/tts_proxy/SC5Hp_gogpMzR1s8OoMjVw.wav
2026-10-13 19:46:10.415 media: only http:// is supported: https://<server>:8124/api/tts_proxy/SC5Hp_gogpMzR1s8OoMjVw.wav
2026-10-13 19:46:10.415 state: thinking -> idle
(My server is name obfuscated as <server> where <server> is the FQDN of my HAOS server. I use split horizon DNS to resolve to different IP addresses for local and Internet devices, with Internet devices getting the WAN IP address of my firewall/router)
There are three things to note here:
- the device is being told to access the wav file using port 8124, which is my external access port. The server itself does not listen on port 8124, that is the external port on my router that is forwarded to 8123 on my HAOS server
- my HAOS server is running the LetsEncrypt app to generate it’s own SSL cert and does not run an HTTP web server
- the logs would suggest that the software on the Echo is only able to use HTTP to access the TTS files
Is there a way of making the Echo Dot voice assistant use HTTPS to access the voice files?
As I understand it, Home Assistant isn’t able to run it’s web server on both HTTP and HTTPS. I’m not a fan of running services over HTTP, even internally, if I don’t have to, yet this particular element of the system seems to expect it. And I’d really rather not remove the SSL configuration on HA and have to run a reverse proxy to access it externally securely.