I already subscribe to Amazon Prime, and I also pay a monthly fee for Amazon music unlimited. Would I still need to pay the $6 per month to use Alexa with HA?
-Thanks
Hi @zBernie
If you want to do it the easy way then I’d recommend subscribing to Nabu Casa’s Home Assistant Cloud service. This will provide easy connection to the Alexa service along with a host of other benefits.
There are other ways to connect HA to Alexa, and whilst free, are way above the level of technical knowledge I wish to acquire.
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Thanks, I’ll look into that.
You don’t pay Amazon and there is no service that Amazon offers that will connect to HA.
If you want to connect HA to Alexa, you need to expose your HA instance to the internet. There are a variety of ways to do this for free, however they can be complicated to set up if you are not tech savy. If you want to go the easy route, that is NabuCasa and it can cost as low as $5/mo if you pay for a full year.
when you do this yourself in complex way, you are running some AWS artifacts (such as lambda) and you might go beyond the free tier limit (should be very hard) and you can be charged.
One thing I am curious about- why would you think you have to pay Amazon to use Alexa?
I started by using some of the “free” connection methods, but my time is not free, and I was spending an awful lot of time keeping things working. Nabu Casa has greatly simplified my life on Home Assistant, and the subscription helps support product development.
I’m not familiar with HA and thought that you paid Amazon to use their service. I’ll definitely keep the Nabu Case in mind.
Oh Amazon does have a paid component. They’re happy to take your money. We just want you to spend it on what you thought you were spending it on.
To your specific question do I pay Amazon. No you can use HA with or without new Alexa. Your trouble is connecting to your home instance. There you either need to know what you are doing, punch holes in routers securely possible setup scripts and code in AWS depending on how you setup etc. Or. Pay Nabu Casa and use thier service.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
(Though I’ve tried).
Anyone who could comprehend the briar patch that is called AWS wouldn’t be here asking questions.
I spent the last year of my 25 year IT career as a Systems Engineer III, migrating our entire IT infrastructure to the Amazon cloud (AWS). I know a bit about AWS.
I used AWS to integrate Alexa in HA and do not pay Amazon.
I have never reached the limit.
- An Amazon Web Services (AWS) account is required to host the Lambda function for your Alexa Smart Home Skill. AWS Lambda is free to use for up to 1-million requests and 1GB outbound data transfer per month.
Here is an overview of the install method. AWS changed some requirements so I’m not sure if the guide is 100% accurate. At first glance it looks updated!
Setting up the Alexa Smart Home Skill without Nabu Casa is actually pretty easy, if you have 20 Minutes to spare and can follow instructions. Once it is set up you don’t need to touch it.
The only difficult thing for some users is setting up the remote access to your HA instance. This can be as easy as opening a port on your router and setting up a domain with SSL through DuckDNS, but can also be quite difficult if you have a more complex setup. Since you describe yourself as IT professional, this shouldn’t be too hard for you (if you can spare the time). Also this usually just has to be set up once and you’re done for good.
You can also start with a free Nabu Casa trial and decide afterwards if it is worth to you to pay a monthly fee.
Noted. Thank you.
Thank you, sounds interesting.
My Nabu Casa Trial expired so i don’t have an active sub at the moment.
Altough i can still expose my HA entities to Alexa in “Voice Assistant” settings in HA.
all i did was connect my Amazon / Alexa Account in Voice Assistant Settings and expose the entities i want to.
They will popup in the Alexa App on your phone or in my case, i did it on my Echo Show directly. Basically straight forward process.
My Echo Show / Alexa has cloud connection anyways to recieve commands and talks locally to HA.
Not quiet sure what the benefits would be if i pay for Nabu Casa now?