Hey folks. I have a ton of customized scripts for Home Assistant and Alexa. I have not really had any trouble, but I have an automation I want to do, but can’t figure out the best way to do it. I have a script I can call from Alexa called “Downstairs Music” that does the following:
Turns on my Pioneer Receiver and selects the proper input (via Harmony)
Turns on my Bluetooth adapter that is connected to the Pioneer Receiver and power controlled by TP-Link smart outlet. (Which the Echo then auto connects Bluetooth to it)
This all works, but I still have to say "Alexa, play 80s music or whatever)
Anyone have any clever ideas about having a Custom Intent (or something easier) to have the music playing trigger this script. My wife would love to say “Alexa, play music” and the Echo triggers my script and plays the music all in one utterance.
I asked about this awhile back and the answer was no, it needed to be a two part process. At the time you could not start output (music in this case) from a source other than the alexa. Ill be interested to see if anything has changed and this is now available.
@erickleejoe I got here for thinking about doing a similar thing, but was going down a different path. In my case, I’m going to look at using Spotify https://home-assistant.io/components/media_player.spotify/ as the music player, but I bet others will work as well. Once configured it’s less that you are using “alexa” per se and more that you call a remote service that you can then orchestrate output to linked devices. I’ve not tripped over anything that looks more obvious for playing Amazon Music, but I wouldn’t be discouraged just yet.
