Was using Alexa new to Home Assistant

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I have had Alexa(s) for about 3 years. We have them throughout the house along with ~70 smart devices (bulbs, sensors, etc.)

I am very new to Home Assistant and left wondering if I should delete the devices from Alexa and only have them through Home Assistant.
The goal is to uses Nabu Casa and Alexa Skill (or whatever I’d need) to have Alexa be the voice interaction for my routines.

Just trying to figure out how to not have redundancies or have one system mess up the other.

Thanks for any advice,

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It depends on how you intend to use HA. Alexa’s integration (Amazon’s choice) is basically one-way. You can use the Alexa Media Player community integration to get better control of your Alexa devices - but don’t expect wholesale control of your devices in Amazon from HA like you get FROM HA to Alexa. If you plan on heavy automation of those things you may want to consider moving their primary point of connection.

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Presumably you are using Alexa skills to control your devices at the moment?

The first thing to check is whether they all have Home Assistant integrations - you may need to keep the Alexa skills for some of them.

You might also look at what the current skills do - if Alexa can give you information (“The temperature in the hall is 20 degrees”) it may be worth keeping that skill - HA won’t be able to reproduce it easily.

I don’t think there’s any reason not to have both, so long as you can keep track.

As far as Nabu Casa goes, my best tip is to start by exposing nothing to Alexa and add HA entities slowly - there are hundreds of them, many more than the number of devices, and you’ll probably only need about 10 per cent.

You do know you have to pay for Nabu Casa, right? :wink:

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Thanks do much for the advice.

Yes I did know that Nabu Casa has the fee.

Is it a fair rule of thumb that HA will do more of the automation and Alexa will still be at the helm for routines and voice commands?

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It simply blows Alexa’s automation / routine capability out of the water. I could explain it here but honestly you wouldn’t believe me until you try. I only use Alexa as a voice interface and try to funnel everything through HA.

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When you say funnel, can you explain what you have done?

I imagine you as calling on “Alexa” to do xyz but then where does that go & how if the routine is not build into Alexa proper?

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I’m in the “move as much as possible to Home Assistant” camp. I only have one device connected via Alexa… and it’s the smartplug that came free with one of our echo dots.

And I’ve got to agree with Nathan,

While Alexa routines may be easy to get started using, they are so limited in what they can do compared to Home Assistant automations and scripts.

There are a few ways to do this. For basic things like turning on or off lights, you just speek the command as you would normally do. For more complex actions the method I use is to create an voice activated Alexa routine paired with an HA script. The HA script handles all the conditional logic and actions.

Make sure you check out the Alexa Media Player custom integration as it handles the HA → Alexa side of things like notifications, activating skills, running routines that you may want to keep in the
Alexa app, even emulating voice commands to control devices you can’t control any other way.

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Could you elaborate on this please ? How would you speak to Alexa and have HA handle the command ?

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Scripts created in HA appear as scenes in the Alexa app, so you setup a routine with a trigger phrases that turns on the desired scene.

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“how can you just speak the command”

Because the HA integration presents whatever device(s) in HA that you choose (you have device level control of what gets exposed) as Alexa devices.

I use a combination of things to trigger HA logic but your best friend will be the good old boolean helper. Turn it on and let HA trigger something.

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I didn’t know that. Or is this only for Nabu Casa ?

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Am I understanding it correctly to say that having the devices in HA and the proper integrations/skills on HA & Alexa allows you to call on Alexa but the action still occurs through HA at the local level instead of going through Amazon’s cloud?

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I use Haaska not Home Assistant Cloud/Nabu Casa, but they both work the same from this regard.

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And there’s a lot of nuances to what you said (like anything Alexa will never be local only the Alexa command has to get to your house somehow…)

But yes.

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Ok but you still need to use Haaska or similar, right. Because right now i don’t see the scripts i created in HA in my scene in the Alexa app.

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Which HA integration are you talking about ? Sorry don’t mean to come across as dumb here.

How would i turn on a boolean on in Alexa that HA can see ? I’m super interested in this.

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Yes, you need to expose your HA instance to Alexa. Have you set up Home Assistant Cloud and configured your includes to share scripts?

You have this reversed… the boolean exists in HA and can be turned on or off via Alexa because it is exposed to Alexa via HA Cloud.

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Right ok understood. No i have not setup HA cloud. For a moment there i thought one could do this without a solution like Haaska or HA cloud.

Thanks!

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Do you find it hard to manage or a hassle to set up ? What has your experience been with it so far? Love to hear your views.

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Can’t speak to the other options as to how ‘hard’ they are to install or manage. But with Nabu Casa and Alexa, I set it up once then manage the device list on average once a quarter. Beyond that there’d only a few times I even needed to think about the integration itself.

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