Morning folks.
Today I was wondering if there was any way to connect the HA instance with Alexa without Nabu. I found 2 integrations. This Alexa Smart Home Integration and this Third-party called Haaska. I found out the third party one was updated on 2019, which is very outdated. I really don’t found if there is any version of the “internal” Smart Home Integration but I thinks if it is directly from the devs, this could work without any issue.
My question is, which one should I select to be able to use the last HA instance and connect with a stable connection to Alexa.
You will find very few people who have used both and can give you anything close to a definitive answer, especially considering the possibilities coming with this year’s focus on voice control and some of the speculation in the media about Amazon’s future commitment to the Alexa project.
I have used Haaska for about 2.5 years, it has only required one minor code maintenance task in that time. It seems to be as stable as anything dependent on the cloud can be.
I’ve been using Haaska for several years now and it still works fine.
I haven’t used the Matthew Hilton code, but assume it works fine too.
I think the biggest driver for anyone, would be the set of instructions needed for setting all of this up. It looks like the instructions on the Alexa Smart Home Integration are well documented and comprehensive, so I would just go with it.
I’ve just looked at the Alexa Smart Home Integration (as a relatively long term Haaska user) and it looks to me like there’s not a lot of difference. Both require fiddling around with Amazon AWS and setting up a skill, both require the HA instance to be visible from the Internet and, a couple of config methods aside, seem to use the same process. It’s almost as though Haaska has been subsumed by the AHS integration. And if that’s the case, it’s probably worth going that route (although Haaska has been very solid for me)
I can 100% affirmatively tell you the reason I have been using Haaska over the actual home assistant branded integration. Home assistant integration requires you to expose port 443 to the internet. They say it’s an amazon requirement, but it is NOT.
I use haaska because I didn’t want to expose a normal every day port to the internet. I was able to forward any port I wanted, but I still had to have a legitimate certificate to be able to get everything working.