I will soon be starting the process of setting up either a mini pc or raspberry pi 5 to setup HA.
Wanted to ask an all important question. My current setup which I’ve had with no issues for many years now is a SmartThings hub with probably about 70% of my devices directly on the ST hub. The ST hub is connected as a skill on my Amazon account and therefore any new devices that I add to ST automatically get picked up as smart home devices that Alexa can also control.
I then have the remaining devices that aren’t really zwave, zigbee, or matter but instead use WiFi and are linked via the specific app and linked to Alexa through the providers Alexa integration skill.
I use an Amazon Echo hub 8 wall panel which I am quite used to and like.
So my question is: with HA, I’ve read that I can actually integrate Alexa into HA so those devices that are only on Alexa currently with HA will end up in HA too via Alexa. This sounds good as currently my Alexa devices arnt visible in ST. But most importantly what about the other way round? Can I have my HA devices appear on Alexa similar to how my ST is and whenever I new devices are added to HA for Alexa to detect them like it does currently with ST. If thats possible that would be great.
But then if I do that and also link Alexa devices to HA then will there be duplicates on Alexa because an Alexa device gets synced with HA then that same HA device gets synced back to Alexa?
Just FYI, Amazon recently changed the Alexa API and many users are having issues with integrations to expose Alexa to HA. The core integration, Alexa Devices, has been updated but the older custom integration, Alexa Media Player, is still unpatched as of 2025/10/11.
The most common advice on this topic for years has been to move everything you can out of Alexa and into HA. Likewise if any of your devices have the option of being controlled locally instead of depending on a cloud-based app, control them locally.
Yes, there are multiple ways to expose HA to Alexa. The easiest is to use Home Assistant Cloud but there are other methods detailed in the docs and elsewhere:
This has been working very well for me - a few hiccups, but no complaints here, as it generally gets the job done. The last update I had some problems with, so I went back to the previous version and it works well for now:
Thank you. Yes ideally I want to try and move everything to HA as the main hub where devices are added and then expose the HA devices to Alexa only. But I’m guessing there may be a good use of being able to expose Alexa to HA too but probably I don’t need to since I’ve had it this way for many years anyway. Plus I think with HA, a lot more of my devices that are on Alexa only may actually be supported directly on HA.
Like ST doesn’t have easy way to add WiFi based devices. Like I have some Tapo devices and although I believe to connect them to WiFi I first need to use the Tapo app, once they are on the WiFi I think HA should be able to control them.
Thank you for this. This looks really interesting and promising. So just to clarify. This will basically turn the HA into a matter hub that can easily be added to Alexa? Then do you have to set which devices can be seen by Alexa on HA? And when you add a new device and allow it to be seen using matter then will Alexa pickup that device automatically?
Also, I know that Alexa is cloud based for its voice and processing but since all the devices will be local, when Alexa communicates with a device on HA will it locally communicate with it or communicate via the cloud? Reason I ask is especially related to things like cameras. A lot of the time cameras currently can be slow on Alexa even though it’s a local camera because it streams it through the canera providers integration which basically is depending on good uptime and response time if camera providers api etc.
by far the matter hub is the best option to expose entities to alexa, indeed entities are not going out of your lan (echo devices are just getting them in the network)
however:
last updates broke almost everything. At the moment also my alexa app is broken with pending entities that can’t be removed
you need to check what kind of entities can be exposed. I’m not sure, for example, cameras can be exposed (you need to check)
I’m still using v76 of the Matter Hub as that was the last version reported as fully working with Alexa. I hadn’t seen any reports advising to upgrade. I’ve been able to add new entities to the Hub and expose them to Alexa.
Awesome thank you so much. Just waiting for my mini pc to arrive some time this week then will get cracking on this.
Just out of curiosity. Is it probably a better idea just to stick to the v76 for the foreseeable future? Like it doesn’t auto-update does it? I’m assuming if it’s not broke and if it’s working then why update if there’s a chance that it can break linking with Alexa and other matter controllers.
Thank you. When you backup HAOS so that you can import it back for example if pc fails and you rebuild a new pc with HAOS then import the backup, will the backup also backup add-ons and all the device connectors etc? Or is it better to maybe use something like CloneZilla and create a complete system image with the configuration that can be dumped back onto a system ?
