Not Interested in Voice Assistant but Desire Voice Notifications

Configuration
1

Today was the final straw trying for the 7th time in two days to reset Alexa Media Player. Now it puts me in an endless signin loop trying to do 2FA.

90% of what I use the AMP integration for is announcements/warnings. Very rarely do I ask it anything in regards to anything in HA.

I want to replace AMP with something that will allow me to still get my voice notifications, even if it is another device.

There are lots of voice devices out there M5 Stack, S3 Box, etc.
I just want to put together something palin.
Any suggestions.
Thanks

2

Couple of options I’m aware of: some people use old phones or tablets with the Fully Kiosk Browser integration, which basically turns them into media players (and alot else too), on which you can play text-to-speech using your preferred service. You would need to install the FKB app on the device, which is not free if you want all the features.

Or if running Android on those old devices, you could install the companion app, and use the TTS variation of the notify service.

These are both Android only though - not sure about iOS.

3

iOS solution would be HomePods, they work great. You can use the built-in systems for TTS on them (if you add the Apple TV integration to reach them) or third party solutions like Airfoil for a robust TTS solution.

4

If you aren’t interested in voice control, pretty much any media player that works locally with HA can be used for TTS notifications. The Piper Add-On can be used to create TTS audio files locally.

I have a few Squeezelite players that I have integrated through Music Assistant including a couple Android devices running the SqueezePlayer app.

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5

I totally understand your frustration! I’ve been battling AMP for 3 months now trying to fix it. But since I’m able to dig into the code and have many years experience coding & troubleshooting software (plus tenacity!), I accidentally figured out how to get Amazon’s new three page login sequence to work with AMP’s old style two page login sequence.

The problem is the new three page login sequence with email, then password, then 2SV. AMP was programmed to do the callback after two pages (the way the Amazon login used to be) but gets an “unsuccessful” response after only two pages since the login sequence did not finish all three pages and AMP returns you to the previous (first) page to try again. So…

At this screen, select the first option

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Enter “x x” for First and last name and click CREATE YOUR AMAZON ACCOUNT

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image412Ă—671 24.7 KB

When that fails, select Sign in Already a customer?

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image435Ă—764 34.7 KB

The page then changes to show both email & password on the same page. (which is still the first page in the callback sequence)

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image410Ă—669 29.4 KB

Now you can select SIGN IN which then proceeds to the 2nd page which is Two-Step Verification

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and the callback to HA will then occur where it will test if your email, password & OTP login was successful or not. If not, it sends you back to the first page in Amazon’s new 3 page sequence.

6

Thank you for the work around.
I did do this, but (and there always is a but) I have to do it a few times a day to make it “stick”.
Is there something else I need to do?

7

Try starting with a clean slate:

  • Delete integration
  • Delete /config/.storage/alexa_*:
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           783 Oct  1 16:40 alexa_auth
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root          8536 Oct  1 16:27 alexa_media.<your_email>.pickle
  • Restart HA and ensure the above files are still not present
  • Clear your browser’s cookies
  • In a new tab, log into your Amazon account to re-establish those cookies
  • In a new tab, log into HA and re-add the integration using the aforementioned workaround to get email & password on one screen, followed by the OTP screen.
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