Basically, yes. It doesn’t play for ten seconds, but that’s just roughly how long it takes to queue up the song, play it, and then play the TTS message. This delay will only happen when the echo is in standby. One other thing… I have Prime Music Unlimited, so I’m honestly not sure if the song I chose is available for non-Unlimited members. Someone will just have to test it and see.
Thank you for this amazing component. Now I can send notifications to all my Echos in my home.
However in order to send notification to my Echo, I have to use this custom service; media_player.alexa_tts. Example action in automation…
action:
service: media_player.alexa_tts
entity_id: media_player.office
data:
message: "Message goes here"
But I prefer to send notifications via the notify service so that I don’t have to change all my existing automation that uses the notify service.
My solution is to recreate the notify entities using Rest platform:
Example for one Echo device…
notify:
- name: office
platform: rest
resource: 'https:/[YOUR HA URL]/api/services/media_player/alexa_tts'
method: POST_JSON
data:
entity_id: 'media_player.office'
headers:
x-ha-access: !secret http_password
content-type: 'application/json'
Hope this helps if you are looking for similar solution.
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By the way, the Alexa TTS seems to ignore the degree (°) or percent (%) symbol in temperature. e.g. 31.1 °C.
It reads out as… “thirty one point one C” instead of “thirty one point one degree Celsius”.
My other custom news briefing and skills for alexa read out fine.
Is it due to encoding issue?
Has anyone been able to get alexa_tts working on a Multi-Room Audio group? I see the group in Home Assistant (media_player.downstairs) with all of the attributes, but the alexa_tts service call isn’t working.
Also thanks to @Justin_144 for the volume set code! I just updated to use your alexa.py file to set volume and it is working great.
I have also had this “Simon says” issue mentioned earlier in this thread.
I have neither talked to Alexa, nor sent any text to her trough HA. Still she is repeating that “Simon says” phrase over and over and over again.
I had to comment out the necessary lines in my config in order to make it stop.
Any ideas of how to solve this issue?
What piece of information would you like me to provide to try to solve this?
nevermind i misunderstood what alexa said
Unfortunately the blank song doesn’t play unless you have Amazon Music Unlimited.
I tried another one and it comes up in the player but it doesn’t play. It just sits there with the song on the screen and I can’t do anything with the media player at all.
This is the message I used in the media_player.play_media service:
{
“entity_id”:“media_player.computer_room_dot”,
“media_content_id”:“Silence 5 seconds”,
“media_content_type”: “AMAZON_MUSIC”
}
“Silence 5 Seconds” is the name of a song I found on amazon music for prime members (which I have).
If I tell Alexa to play the song “Silence 5 Seconds” by voice it immediately plays the correct song by the correct artist so Alexa knows the song I mean when I use voice control.
May be I’m not understanding how I designate a specific song in the service call but it worked (but told me it wasn’t included unless I had unlimited) when I tried it like this:
{
“entity_id”:“media_player.computer_room_dot”,
“media_content_id”:“Blank (Silent Track)”,
“media_content_type”: “AMAZON_MUSIC”
}
Well I think it is playing, but the thing you’re seeing with the media player is just what normally happens after a song ends. In my version of alexa.py, did you try changing the song to the “Silence 5 seconds” song (on line 507)? I briefly just tested it, and it seemed to work (the TTS calls with a “volume” value, that is). I’ll update my version in my repository to use the Silence 5 Seconds song.
If you can’t get it to work, try finding a silent track longer than 5 seconds (and let me know if you find one)
you might be right. maybe it is working and I just don’t see it.
I’ll do some more testing and see what happens.
got it working yesterday - just make sure you dont quote any of the credentials and use amazon.co.uk … then it should just work …
What’s the scale for the volume setting? 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest)?
Have mine at .9… When trying .10 there was no response.
Volume range is 0-1. You can check the current volume setting in the States panel.
.10 is the same as .1 lol. 1 is the max.
Thank you.
Could you share that card your using also?
I just not get an echo dot configured in HA and was thinking about doing something similar as far as whole house audio. I have an 90’s NuTone Intercom system in my house with 6 speakers and 5 stations throughout the house. I opened up the master panel and found an RCA Mono jack on one of the boards. I have ordered a connector and some cable. Plan is to connect Echo Dot up to it. Listen to music and get alerts on HA Events.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks
The suggestion (and successful one at that) from @finity was to put my echo and dots into a group and just alexa_tts to the group instead of each dot… it works great.
I have noticed the last couple of mornings the 10 second blank song would re-queue up then play the notification. This was on alexa.py 0.9.5.1.
I have reverted back to 0.9.5 for the time being. Not concerned with the volume at this time.
i dont know if others have this problem too (didntread the whole topic 
) but its not good.
about 6 times every minut i get this error in my log:
Log Details (WARNING)
Sun Oct 14 2018 23:29:47 GMT+0200 (Midden-Europese zomertijd)
Updating alexa media_player took longer than the scheduled update interval 0:00:10
can be because i have quite a lot going
6x echo dot
2x firestick
firetab
alexa installed on a tablet (not active still found)
echosim on PC (not active still found)
a group
a mobile
all discovered as mediaplayer
Yeah mine is always doing it I have 4 dots, one tab and one echo v2