Echo Devices (Alexa) as Media Player - Testers Needed

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2612

After reading this i excitedly retried mine as i was experiencing the same as wombateer, i can pause/resume and adjust volume but i can’t get any TTS/notify to work at all. Unfortunately nothing has changed here and still not working. Hope it is something weird on Amazon’s side and its just not finished being rolled out yet :smile:

edit: I was doing some more debugging and enabled advanced debugging and deleted the pickle file to capture the new logged data and it started working. I definitely had a working connection before because i could pause media etc so not entirely sure why that fixed it but i’ll take working over not any day.

1 Like
2613

Hmm just reading your reply makes me wonder if changing my amazon account from co.uk to .de and back has actually ‘solved’ my problem. As to do this I had to delete the pickle file and it got recreated. Did you have to go through the Captcha process again after deleting the pickle file?

2614

No didn’t need to go through captcha again, just deleted pickle and restarted homeassistant and it reconnected automatically.

2615

hi all, I have Alexa as media player integration in my hassio, I use the tts service for automation to speak the days when to bring out rubbish (I use a package created for this purpose with the option to use google or alexa media player tts). In the notify automation there is a telegram message and also a call to alexa tts service, I added before and after the tts part a volume set at higher value and then at lower value. If I manually send tts message I hear it, if not, I see only led on my echo light when the volume is set higher or lower, but not hear anything, maybe because the media player don’t go out of standby? Is there a solution to bring alexa media player out of standby before using it to speak tts message?
Thank you for the help.

2616

Could be this issue

and

2617

Hey, I’m getting this problem… Can you elaborate on your fix?

Edit - NM but still getting other issues.

2618

don’t know if this is related to my issue, I ask a tip for this thing, I have the rubbish python scripts that calls alexa tts service, it is written in this way

try:
   for entity_alexa in entity_alexa_tts:
  hass.services.call('media_player', 'alexa_tts', {'entity_id': 'media_player.' + entity_alexa, 'message': message})
except:
    pass

how I can change this code to another with the requirements of notify.alexa_media service?
I’m trying replacing with data, target etc. but don’t know the right syntax, for example

try:
for entity_alexa in entity_alexa_tts:
  hass.services.call('notify.alexa_media', {'message': message, 'data':'type': tts, 'target': media_player.echo_plus})

but doesn’t work in this way

2619

Hi I’ve just updated to HA 0.92.0 and I’m getting this in my log:

Unable to find services.yaml for the alexa_media integration

Is this anything to be concerned about?

2620

Saw that myself. Did a lot of testing and everything is still working the way it was.

2621

I don’t know the specific python you’re using, but based off the earlier version you posted, you can try this. I probably won’t help debug it further than this one suggestion.

try:
for entity_alexa in entity_alexa_tts:
  hass.services.call('notify', 'alexa_media', {'message': message, 'data':'type': 'tts', 'target': 'media_player.' + entity_alexa})

Probably not; it impacts the help function for the dev-service developer tool. We have an issue to fix it for 0.92 along with another change.

2622

Ah, I’m glad it’s not just me and it’s a known issue. :slight_smile: I’ll keep this addon updated.

2623

How can you add dynamic values under message? I tried the following but it doesn’t work…

 action:
    - service: media_player.alexa_tts
      entity_id: media_player.living_room
      data:
        message: '{{ states("input_select.nhl_fav_team") }} Lose!'
2624

like this

- service: notify.alexa_media
  data_template:
    target: '{{ states.sensor.last_alexa.state }}'
    message: "Temperature: {{ states.sensor.yoursensor }}"       
    data:
      type: tts
1 Like
2625

I did this but instead of only stating the chosen input_select it names all the list…

 - service: notify.alexa_media
      data_template:
        target: 'Living Room'
        message: '{{ states.input_select.nhl_fav_team }} game starts now'       
        data:
         type: tts
2626

OK got it:

- service: notify.alexa_media
      data_template:
        target: 'Living Room'
        message: '{{ states.input_select.nhl_fav_team.state }} game starts now'       
        data:
         type: tts
2627

something change in the past couple of days? Went out of town for 4 days, came back and my announcements no longer work. But a manual service call still works fine.

    service: notify.alexa_media
    data:
      target:
        - media_player.livingroom_2
      data:
        type: announce
        method: all
      message: "Back Door"

this no longer seems to work. this is in an automation…
but

{
"message":"back door",
"data":{"type":"announce"},
"target":["media_player.livingroom_2"]
}

manually works.

2628

If a manual call still works, then it’s likely it’s not this component. It’s probably a HA issue. One thing to check is if you are able to manually trigger the automation?

2629

Not sure why this fixed it… But I just went to the automations section in the UI. Added one letter to the automation name and saved it, works just fine now. Had to do that with every single automation.

2630

I have the notify hooked up, but it’s not clear to me how I can use this as a “notifier” for the alert component. Is the notifier “alexa_media”? How can I specify the specific target entity?

2631

I don’t understand how the last_alexa function works across multiple amazon accounts. I have 4 devices on 2 accounts:

media_player.alexa_attic (account 1)
media_player.alexa_lounge (account 2)
media_player.alexa_bedroom (account 2)
media_player.alexa_backroom (account 2)

I have these set up in the ‘last_alexa’ template, but when ask Alexa to report on a script (which has the states.sensor.last_alexa.state set as entity_id) from an account 2 device she only responds in the attic. When I Iook at the States in HA, I can see ‘last_called: true’ for both the attic and 1 device on account 2. This must be because HA doesn’t know how to merge them.

My idea is, is it possible to modify the JSON for the value_template to say something like "map attribute entity_id from ‘last_called=true’ but if multiple trues, based on the timestamp (or log) within HA States of the latest one of the last_called=trues? :thinking:

Or alternatively if it’s possible to set the other true’s previous state back to false as it’s run?

(Sorry but I’m very much a copy/paste/modify type of programmer, so I couldn’t think of a better way to express this :grin:)