Group for Alexa devices

Configuration
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1

I used the group helper to setup a group for some of my Alexa media device’s. It looks like this:

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The members look like this:

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I tried to use the group in a Notification action, but it didn’t work.

This does work:

action: notify.alexa_media
data:
message: Front Door Motion
data:
cache: true
type: tts
target: >-
media_player.bedroom_echo_dot, media_player.den_echo_dot,
media_player.office_echo_dot

I’d like to replace the target with my group, but it doesn’t work.

What am i doing wrong?

2

Alexa doesn’t always play nice with HA’s media player controls… it’s not super surprising that an HA media player group doesn’t work.

You can set up your speaker groups in the Alexa app. Doing it that way will add a new media player entity that you can target as well as a notify action specific to that group. Just be aware that when sending a TTS message to such a group you need to use the announce type, the plain tts type will not work.

3

You did not build a notify group. You built a group of media players…

Group - Home Assistant.

Look up how to group notify services into a single notify group there.

I don’t remember if it works for Alexa, or. If I had to do what Drew said. but I do seem to remember when I tried the notices were WAY out of sync and it drove me nuts. And I abandoned it quickly.

1 Like
4

Yeah the syncing can be really bad with a notify group, but it does work. The only way to get them relatively synced is grouping them in the Alexa app, but then you’re limited to using announce…

@Wild_Willy

If you want to use the media player group, you can use a template to extract the entities from the group:

action: notify.alexa_media
data:
  message: Front Door Motion
  data:
    type: tts
  target: "{{ state_attr('media_player.alexa_media_group', 'entity_id') }}"

This ends up being equivalent to your example automation.

5

I built a Notify group in the Config YAML, but that didn’t work either. Apparently, I have to use announce with a Notify group?

6

Thanks, i do have a Speaker group setup on the Alexa side, but i haven’t seen it in HA.

I think I’ll just stick with what i have, since it’s only three speakers I’m using.