Echo Devices (Alexa) as Media Player - Testers Needed

garywilson4 · February 22, 2019, 11:35am

Thanks I’ll try that

lubeda · February 22, 2019, 12:27pm

What about the sequence thing. I try to start the flashbriefing with alexy and nothing happend. I am on 0.10.2 alexa.py and hass.io 0.88

Remco_Timmer · February 22, 2019, 12:47pm

I think it’s not merged in that version yet. I’m still using your patch @lubeda, for that reason.

lubeda · February 22, 2019, 12:53pm

but my @lubeda version does not work on .88

Corey_Maxim · February 22, 2019, 2:36pm

I love this project! I use it for many things!

I have a question for anybody that could maybe answer.

I know we can’t invoke Alexa skills using the HA UI yet.

But I did try the bespoken virtual machine to successfully start my car using their test scripts, but I couldn’t figure out how to set the rest command and scripts to work in HA. But since this is a available service would this even be possible with this component?

Also I was considering maybe picking up two dots (since they are fairly inexpensive)
Does anybody think if I took one of those apart and ran a aux cable from one dot and hard wired that to the microphone input of the second dot if I sent a TTS (Simon Says) from the first dot to say “ Alexa, ask MyChevy to start my car” place a delay to wait for a response the TTS my PIN number. Do you think that would work?

I’m not even sure if it’s possible to do that but was trying to figure out a way to invoke the skill.
And wondered if anybody knew if that could even be done.

Thanks

lonebaggie · February 22, 2019, 2:58pm

I use a dummy bulb in the alexa app. which can trigger HA to do anything see

This python script which is the basis of this custom component

will run alexa automatons

Between the two techniques this should allow two way communication

wickie44 · February 22, 2019, 3:21pm

sorry i know this might sound stupid but to confirm if you are running hass.io 0.88 you need to change the name of alexa.py to media_player.py and move it to a folder called alexa? is that correct?

Corey_Maxim · February 22, 2019, 3:22pm

Thank you! I will definitely have a look at this over the weekend! I’m sill very bad with AppDaemon, but Have had help in the past setting it up @ReneTode now it’s time to see if I can manage to figure it out.

I appreciate your post @lonebaggie

Have a great day! I’ll let you know how it goes!

Superimo88 · February 22, 2019, 7:44pm

If Ichange custom_components/media_player/alexa.py to custom_components/alexa/media_player.py . Haaska doesn’t work

andrew.vint · February 22, 2019, 8:05pm

Update @Prathik_Gopal … my media_player.alexa.tts seems to be missing.

markbajaj · February 22, 2019, 9:31pm

This is my set up and it works fine:

root@docker:/var/lib/docker/volumes/homeassistant/_data/custom_components/alexa# pwd

/var/lib/docker/volumes/homeassistant/_data/custom_components/alexa

ls -l

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 47167 Feb 19 11:27 media_player.py

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 21 09:46 __pycache__

alandtse · February 23, 2019, 1:30am

We’ll have sequence support based off your contribution and more in 1.0.0 which we plan to release later today or tomorrow after some final testing.

Obicom · February 23, 2019, 8:11am

with change to version 1.0.0 tts is not working … could someone confirm?

alandtse · February 23, 2019, 8:27am

Can you provide your logs please? My production and test environments are working.

alandtse · February 23, 2019, 8:52am

@keatontaylor
We are pleased to announce that we have officially pushed version 1.0.0 to the master branch. This requires HA 0.88.0 and greater. If you have an older version of HA you will need to use the old branch which is 0.10.2. We do not plan any more updates to that older branch.

Please note, there are breaking changes including the need to change your configuration.yaml.
Please follow the migration instructions completely.

We fixed a bunch of outstanding bugs and added features including:

Volume control regardless of playing state
Multiple accounts.
Alexa sequence and routine support.
Reduced the frequency of polling by primarily only polling playing devices and reducing the keep alive poll. This will avoid flooding Amazon particularly with those with multiple devices. Please note you may have to interact with your device with your voice or in HA for the media player to start refreshing again.

Full changelog.

Moving forward:
We continue to work on getting this ready for HA inclusion. We will be creating a notification component (Announce, TTS, App push) and will in the future deprecate the media_player.alexa_tts service in favor of the notify service.

As always, please use the the Wiki and FAQ if you need instructions or have questions. Also, we appreciate any help in documenting features since this thread is basically unsearchable now. We also use GitHub for bug reports/feature requests.

lonebaggie · February 23, 2019, 8:52am

events are overtaking us, as of version 1.0 this custom component now supports all the features of

Amazon Alexa per Shell fernsteuern (Echo remote control)

So this script is now no longer required

alandtse · February 23, 2019, 9:18am

Thanks for the kind words, but not quite I believe. We’re missing some of the features like WHA management, but we’re trying to catch up.

ThaNerd · February 23, 2019, 9:42am

Can this output custom TTS on my Alexa devices? For instance when door lock is unlocked it will say a welcome message.

pembo · February 23, 2019, 10:09am

yes

h4nc · February 23, 2019, 11:05am

Just a little note: When you update to 1.0.0 you wil probably get new entities with the ending_2

so if it was media_player.X it will become media_player.X_2. Delete those entities in .storage or in the new section in home assistant and restart to get your old entity names again. This way you don’t have to cahnge your automations to the new names.

This might be obvious for most users, but maybe not for new ones.