Just a quick write up on the Amazon Alexa announcements from yesterday. It’s amazing how many of the things announced, I’ve been doing for a long time with the help of Home Assistant already… But There are some cool things coming down the pike including Local Voice Control (which will be AMAZING for Home Assistant I thinik). Very excited to see this.
Hope you enjoy reading.
-Carlo
Location based routines are definitely going to be awesome. For some time now I have a “Alexa remind me of x when I leave zone y” on my to-do list. Its easy to do with Appdaemon and a custom skill, but if they include it on their own even better.
The way I understood local voice processing is that it only works for zigbee devices directly connected to the Echo Plus, not for things connected via HA cloud or haaska.
Correct on the Local Voice Processing but most of my lights are hue and this will provide some much needed relief when the internet goes out. Plus it’s a first step… more and more may come down to local processing. I’m sure they are doing everything they can to make the red circle go away. 
Echo auto looks just what I need hopefully it will be released in Australia soon enough
Yeah … I’ve pre-ordered mine already. What are you hoping to use it for? I like this idea of a secondary presence detection when we leave… so we can kick off a Location based routine to mark us as away and shut the lights down.
Yeah presence detection as a start, I want to replace what I use ok google for on my android phone also. So turn on spotify, find youtube vids for the kids, play latest HA Podcast and now play Carlos lastest vid
Will the Echo Plus still work with HA Cloud? I don’t care about the Zigbee integration (but it’s fine, whatever), but I do want the nicer speakers the Plus has to offer.
Have they already sent the invites for pr-order for car echo? Been looking at my inbox but haven’t seen anything.
I was able to pre-order right from the page the day of the announcement. Looks like they pulled that feature back now though.
I don’t see why not. Especially if you are not interested in connecting devices directly to the Plus.
It was the same thing with the original Echo. When they sell out the first production run, they remove preorder from their site.