Please don’t read as a rant, I’m not mad, just confused. I’m subscribed to Nabu Casa and I will renew my subscription, mainly because I’d like to support the project.
I set up HA at the beginning of 2023 to monitor important stuff about my home and notify me if something isn’t looking good. I’m talking about pumps, flooding, circuit breaker overloading, doors properly closed.
It is very important to me that something emits a sound to me if something is going wrong, so I setup Alexa and various notifications. Probably I would do it differently now, but this is not the main point here.
From the Nabu Casa home page, it is not clear to me that the “Easily connect to voice assistants” part is that this connection is unidirectional! What I mean is that from Alexa I can turn a light on and off (Alexa → HA) but a switch can’t notify Alexa that has been activated (HA → Alexa)
Up to that point, I though it was part of the subscription, but instead none of my money goes to the individual maintaining this feature, because it is a third-party!
To be honest I felt kinda cheated, but again, my question is: I’ve got this wrong? Can I make my Alexa speak using a feature of the subscription I’m not currently aware instead of a third party integration?
Alexa speaking is never promised. You are only promo connection. The fact that a third party integration managed to use an undocumented api and make even that work is a miracle let alone staying on the moving target that is Amazon. None of that is in HA core or Nabu’s responsibilities or anywhere close.
Also just a word of advice. Amazon and the Alexa paid speech model powered by Anthropic will be starting later this year. Guess how much attention they’ll (Amazon) be putting in keeping traditional Alexa running as bad as they are hemorrhaging cash.
Its time to start looking.
That said the connectivity piece is only a fraction of what the Nabu sub goes to. Besides easy basic connectivity (that’s it) you’re also supporting dev, supporting matter and ZWave and esphome efforts in Open Home foundation and many other things.
While I commiserate with your frustration, no one has cheated you… you just misunderstood what the HA Cloud provides regarding connection to Alexa. The connection is not unidirectional. It allows command intents to be passed from Alexa to Home Assistant. It also allows Home Assistant to pass back the state data from exposed entities to Alexa.
No, there is no core integration to perform those functions. As I understand it, the TTS integrations that are included in core tend to use either local or cloud services to return an audio file which is then played on a local media player. Alexa does not provide a method to cast/play audio files locally. This is a limitation that Amazon has put in place and maintained even though there have been many, many requests made to them over the years.
If it is “very important”, you would be advised not to rely on any cloud services… including HA Cloud. At the very least you should design your notification system to roll-over to a fully local method if there is any loss of internet connection.
I agree! This a good time to design something ad-hoc with esphome dedicated to notifications, like a panel with some lights and buzzers, that relies only on the local network.
Thanks for the responses, I will probably ditch the third-party Alexa integration all together.
Just as closing remark, this is what I came up as an a fully local alternative the Alexa Media Player intergration, using Piper and the I2S component of ESPHome (in theory also a Media Player, but I will use it only for voice announcement)
