In order to integrate Home Assistant with Amazon Echo it was necessary to modify the security and open Home Assistant to incoming connections, plus creating a sort of dynamic domain pointing to the HA ip address and other complex things.
Then arrived the Home Assistant Cloud, that simplified the whole process in a couple of clicks, without the need to change the security.
However on the Alexa Integration component there is still written that in order to build custom commands to use with Echo, we need to use the old method that involves changing the security, creating an Amazon develop account, parse https strings, and so on.
Is still true with Home Assistant Cloud ?
Is it possible to create new custom commands for Alexa with few clicks and editing configuration files, without change the Home Assistant security and pointing a dns domain to the physical HA machine ?
Like @Bobby_Nobble is also pointing out, it can be helpful to say what u have in mind. It is possible to create some way of custom commands. In the Alexa app you can configure a custom phrase and link that to a smart device, if you have it setup with the Home Assistant skill you can for example link it to a script in Home Assistant.
I stumbled across this post looking for an answer to what I think original post was asking.
I’ve written several custom alexa skills to handle things through home assistant, like controlling my home theater system, DVR, and getting custom weather reports from my backyard weather station. While I understand the Alexa/cloud integration can be used to control lights and switches etc, is there a way to point the custom skill endpoint to the cloud so that I don’t have to keep port 443 open for the custom Alexa skills? Here is what I’m referring to (specifically the requirements section)
I would like to be able to use very easily the HA cloud in the basic setup (without too much struggle with new ports open / domains setup / https and other things…) to teach to Alexa how to react on several “unsupported” devices that I have in HA, whose values and settings, actually can be seen and controlled only in the web interface.
So I would like to say:
“Alexa, what is the humidity of the Kitchen hygrometer ?”
“Alexa, what is the pressure of the Bedroom barometer ?”
“Alexa, what is the battery level of the bedroom thermometer ?”
“Alexa, raise the bedroom blinds at 50%”
“Alexa, check if the bathroom window is open…”
that could involve to develop skills into Amazon AWS, but always without fighting with ports and domains, and using only references to HA Cloud.
Not yet. It seems that reading the humidity is a problem of AWS and Alexa only
If I ask to Google it says the humidity.
Regarding the pressure, none of them is capable of reading it.