The Alexa team just announced their new implementation of the Audio Skill part. Any chance this gets included? In some way?
Would this give the ability to use Alexa to stream an alert/notification? It would be awesome to use the Echo as a notification platform!
As far as I understand yes. You can now send intents for it to play a audio file.
NinjaEdit:
Sorry I think I misunderstood your intention. You still need an Intent from your device for that tho. So you would need to send an Intent from your device to receive a Notification…so…I think that is a no.
For me more interesting is that you could specify a media_player and automatically map the play/next/stop Intents to that media player.
Cheers
I was thinking Rube Goldberg-ish; for a non dynamic notification, say an alert that the mail has arrived (by state change of a binary_sensor in the mailbox) have it play an audio recording of the classic “You Got Mail!” in MP3 format.
I haven’t read into the announcement yet - just taking a quick course on angular.js - but what provisions are there for storage? Like, could I save my file mentioned above on my Amazon Music Library and direct it to play from there?
I took a quick look earlier - it looks like it it is intended to stream from a URL somewhere on the Internet - it is intended to let people add skills for podcasts etc.
I REALLY want to be able to use Alexa for unsolicited notifications but I don’t think this is it yet 
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So it could be used for pre-recorded announcements like the above, “You’ve got Mail!”, example? What if you have multiple Alexa’s? Could an alarm be set to play Reveille in my kid’s rooms on Alexa? 
No,not cant do that sadly - you need to tell Alexa to do something e.g. Start the replay, there is no way to make her do anything without a voice command at the moment.
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Oooooohhh… OK… I got it now 
I looked into this extensively last night and have come to the conclusion that it’s way outside of the scope of Home Assistant, so I personally won’t implement it but anyone else is welcome to.
No, this won’t let you make Alexa speak or play files without you first saying something. My suggestion for those that want that functionality is to setup a Raspberry Pi as a Bluetooth audio sender and then ask Alexa to connect to it.
Well folks, it looks like we may be about to get our wish!
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I saw that - I am really hopeful they will also add a push capability to the API!
Word on the street was that GoogleHome was going to include a push API so this may be Amazon’s “shot fired across the bow” since they have a head start. I’m hoping because a combo of Echo push and HASS would be AWESOME!
Absolutely! Plus now Sonos have announced their partnership, it makes Sonos/Echo/HA/Push an unbeatable combination IMO!
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