Looking forward to part 3 and tying this all together in a script and automation. A lot of videos show how to get this far but skip over putting it to use which leaves some inexperienced users in the dark. Your videos are very thorough and easy to follow!
Great video. In addition to the things you covered, there is also an easy way to get Alexa to play music or a radio stations: Use Call Service with: service: media_player.play_media data: media_content_id: play radio one media_content_type: custom target: entity_id: media_player.bedroom_2 Just put some instruction after media_content_id: . This can be anything you might say to Alexa. This isn't limited to music or radio stations: you can do anything!
@@KrispKiwi I don't have Spotify so I can't be sure. How do you ask Alexa to play something on Spotify? Is it: Alexa, play xyz on Spotify? If so then "media_content_id: play xyz on Spotify" should work.
So, this was an excellent two part series. I am now using my Alexa to call out and start a google routine. I just place the nest on top of alexa. I cannot find a way to fire a google routine directly from home assistant. This work around works fine. (assistant relay is not longer supported)
Can I have Alexa speak what I have copied to my clipboard on my iPhone at a certain time of day? If so how would I do this? I’m trying to set up a custom morning alarm message on my iPhone so it’s different each day with Apple shortcuts and Alexa. Ideally I want the TTS to be triggered from Apple Shortcuts for when I shut off my alarm.
After updating the home assistant, the space to write text to convert into voice on the mini media player card no longer appears, do you know how to fix it?
Nice video, and after a few watched your's make me understant how it work. but and about you create a video showing alexa playing a siren triged by sensor when the alarm is armed. and only can turn off after disarm the alarm ? :) this would be amaizing :) thanks again
Is there actually a Mark for everything else in this world too? Many thanks for your detailed and exemplary tutorials and tips! This is a real pleasure!
Hey Mark, excellent video... you may have covered this, but does Alexa have any way of changing the style of voices with HA? I know on OEM Amazon Alexa, you can now change the voice between male and female voices, can that be done with the Service Call?
This video is great. Is there a way to use one media card to control all of my echoes? Like select which echo/echos I want for text to speech in a drop down or something like that?
Hello it seems that i get an error while trying to use an mp3 file on my echo. the error message is that they cannot find the "simon says EU skill" have you heard something about that ? is there any that have information about this issue ? nevertheless great video keep it up ! truly helped me there !
thanks for the vdo Mark, one quick question, I see you mentioned making HA group of echos will allow playing the mp3 file. however, I've tried making the group (both in groups.yml and through helpers) it does not play the mp3 which is accessible fine on a browser.
Is there anyway of sending an announcement at a specific volume level? Some Alexa apps play very loudly so I adjust the volume on my device when using that app. Then when a notification triggers I don't hear it. :(
How do you add volume up control to announce the sequence and then once the sequence has completed let the volume of alexa resume to the original volume before the sequence ran? Great channel and learning heaps from your vids.
Hi Mark, with the TTS i left a comment on the part 1 video about having it go to all the Alexa's in addition to this, i would like preset buttons that will send out pre set sentance to all the Alexas, is this possible?
For the TTS I notice that it always uses the default alexa female voice instead of the voice thats setup on the alexa. Is there a way to change this for TTS?
Is there any known bug at the moment with TTS and Alexa? I've followed your videos and tried a bunch of different methods online, however nothing works. Within home assistant cloud I also try out the sample tts feature, it'll work fine playing through the browsers but it will not play anything on my Alexa devices :(
I literally heard a monorail announcement chime last night and thought - if only I could somehow capture that and have it as my announcement chime on Home Assistant and less than 24 hours I've got just that - thanks to you Mark! You're an absolute legend. But how can you do more than one sound effect. Do you just keep repeating the process and adding them to the services YAML? I'm rather new to this. Thanks!
Heya :) You can either write a loop or as an alternative use a custom mp3 of your sound (also did a video on that). I prefer the mp3s as you can easily start and stop the track with automations.
you can also use type: routine to start a routine. Did you know if is possible to send a command to alexa like a question, in other words ask alexa something (i.e. "what the time is it?") with a service call?
You can use the announce feature which will broadcast on all devices. You can also make use of the new run in parallel action to have multiple speakers go off (parallel may not necessarily be in sync though).
by the way, I never saw this covered but how many Alexa smart speaker should I have ? is it overkill to have one in every room? because it's nice to be able to trigger automations in every room. since If there was a room I was in and let's say there was no Alexa speaker then I wouldn't be able to trigger automations ? what you think ?
Does "type: announce" only work on true Echo devices? I'm trying it on a Sonos One which has Alexa built in and TTS works, but I can't get an announcement with a sound at the beginning.
It will also work on Sonos devices that are setup as alexa devices. In your alexa list you should have a device imported as your sonos alexa. This will be the device you target and not the standard sonos one (if using the sonos integration). Using the Sonos with its standard TTS works much quicker than the alexa one btw and has 0 setup if your sonos is integrated via the sonos integration.
@@MarkWattTech Mark, thanks. Yes I have the Sonos integration as well and I carefully named the Alexa portion so I could tell them apart. TTS works but Announce doesn't. However, I'm thinking an alternative is to just play a sound effect at the beginning of the TTS message to achieve the same effect as "announce". Not sure why I can't get announce working :/
10:45 Is there a way to play and download the TTS sound file of what Alexa spoke after you type some text in? Example: Alexa says "Today is a wonderful day" --> Generate and download a audio file of Alexa speaking that sentence.
Can I just check, are you now able to send TTS to Sonos speakers using the notify Alexa? I've not been able to do this, only to actual Amazon devices. Thanks.
You can use tts on sonos directly (without alexa). If you setup your Sonos to use Alexa as the voice assistant you will get a sonos media player in the alexa integration that you can target. That the entity I target throughout the video and it works great. The only issue is Sonos devices cannot be grouped with Echos (in Alexa app only). You can create a HA media group though. Hope that helps?
@@MarkWattTech interesting. Mine all show up in the list of devices but I cannot get them to play any TTS from Alexa. When I had the Nabu Casa subscription going I could use their cloud TTS service, but still not Alexa. I must be getting something wrong somewhere.
Hello Mark I have been using tts with Alexa Media Player without any problem for more than a year. But a few weeks ago Alexa Media Player stopped working although I did not change anything. All the Alexa Media Player connected identities now have the status 'not connected'. This is very annoying as I have several automations that use tts notifications that do not work anymore. Do you have an idea what could be the reason this and how to fix it? I always immediately do any updates that are indicated.
Problem solved. There was an error in an incorrectly entered Amazon region domain in the Alexa Media Player configuration. I still don't understand why that error suddenly popped up even though I hadn't made any changes to the configuration...
is it possible to change the type from tts to announce if the target is a group maybe something like : if {{ who }} equals media_player.everywhere type = announce else tts ?? any help would be greatly appreated alexa_tts_example: alias: Alexa TTS Test 1 sequence: - service: notify.alexa_media_kitchen_dot data: data: type: tts method: speak target: - media_player.kitchen_dot message: "This is an example of text-to-speech"
is it possible to randomize various custom/local MP3 using this method? I was able to randomize text or messages but to play random MP3 from local is throwing me for a loop.
Actionable notifications is it’s whole own video 🤪. It’s a bit of a setup. I have previously covered it but will refresh it at some point 👍🏻 Thanks as always Alex! 😁
@@MarkWattTech I had watched the previous video and bookmarked it to come back to but then forgotten about it 🤦🏼♂️. You expect me to remember stuff from a year ago?! How about instead of actionable notifications, being able to setup a voice command on Alexa and it then run an automation for you in HA.
@@AlexBoltonKing if you create a script in HA, say, "My Script" and expose it to Alexa then you can say: Alexa, run My Script. If you don't like saying "run" then you can make an Alexa routine and use some other command.
Alexa media player keeps asking for 2 factor authentication after every few minutes, otherwise my automation does not work. Would you have any idea about this?
Custom mp3s are no more working Alexa says I have trouble accessing ur Simon says EU skill right now, and yes I have the bit rate reduced using audacity and the link is working perfectly when opened through a browser Used the file from Jovo, but still the same error message
I have had a play with NTTS and things like Polly. There's a bit more setup involved and a subscription. However I've found I really like the HA Cloud TTS voice and it says things perfectly so I would personally just use that if I didn't have echoes everywhere.
Is it? 😬 - ill fix it now Hmm it looks like its an issue with the Url being long. Only not working on some devices. Added a short link. Failing that just checkout MarkWattTech on GitHub :)
Looking forward to part 3 and tying this all together in a script and automation. A lot of videos show how to get this far but skip over putting it to use which leaves some inexperienced users in the dark. Your videos are very thorough and easy to follow!
Thanks Steve. I’ll try and have a shorter gap than 4 months for part 3 😂👍🏻
+1 I can get service call working but not in an automation.
Great video. In addition to the things you covered, there is also an easy way to get Alexa to play music or a radio stations:
Use Call Service with:
service: media_player.play_media
data:
media_content_id: play radio one
media_content_type: custom
target:
entity_id: media_player.bedroom_2
Just put some instruction after media_content_id: . This can be anything you might say to Alexa. This isn't limited to music or radio stations: you can do anything!
Hey Geoff, do you know if its possible to play spotify? I've tried to set it up but no luck.
Hi Geoff, do you have video for that? It will be easy for us to follow. Thanks
yes i use that also try sing happy birthday ;) or tell me a joke
@@KrispKiwi I don't have Spotify so I can't be sure. How do you ask Alexa to play something on Spotify? Is it: Alexa, play xyz on Spotify? If so then "media_content_id: play xyz on Spotify" should work.
@@mohammadal-thuwad4075 sorry, I don't make videos. Maybe Mark could add this into one of his???
Danke!
You put out some super detailed and helpful tutorials Mark!
Thank for the feedback 😊
Thanks!
Thanks dude!
Was looking to add a sound before my bin day notification - legend
Glad to have helped :)
So, this was an excellent two part series. I am now using my Alexa to call out and start a google routine. I just place the nest on top of alexa. I cannot find a way to fire a google routine directly from home assistant. This work around works fine. (assistant relay is not longer supported)
Can I have Alexa speak what I have copied to my clipboard on my iPhone at a certain time of day? If so how would I do this? I’m trying to set up a custom morning alarm message on my iPhone so it’s different each day with Apple shortcuts and Alexa. Ideally I want the TTS to be triggered from Apple Shortcuts for when I shut off my alarm.
You are officially my hero!
Thankyou for that extremely useful tutorial. can I integrate echo show camera into home assistant?
Next level stuff. Very cool!
After updating the home assistant, the space to write text to convert into voice on the mini media player card no longer appears, do you know how to fix it?
Also just noticed this! The service call still works but not sure about the media card. I will investigate
@@MarkWattTech yes , service call works, but mini media player card , the line for write the message don’t exist anymore
Nice video, and after a few watched your's make me understant how it work.
but and about you create a video showing alexa playing a siren triged by sensor when the alarm is armed. and only can turn off after disarm the alarm ? :) this would be amaizing :)
thanks again
Is there actually a Mark for everything else in this world too? Many thanks for your detailed and exemplary tutorials and tips! This is a real pleasure!
Glad to have helped 😁
Hey Mark, excellent video... you may have covered this, but does Alexa have any way of changing the style of voices with HA? I know on OEM Amazon Alexa, you can now change the voice between male and female voices, can that be done with the Service Call?
Is it possible to call a "sound" to be played on the everywhere group?
Hey Mark, thank you for all of your videos! They have been helpful. Do you know of a way to resume music after Alexa TTS?
When he said use "play_media" instead of "media_play", I believe the other option starts the music
Very informative!! Thanks!!
Glad it was helpful!
This video is great. Is there a way to use one media card to control all of my echoes? Like select which echo/echos I want for text to speech in a drop down or something like that?
Hello it seems that i get an error while trying to use an mp3 file on my echo. the error message is that they cannot find the "simon says EU skill" have you heard something about that ? is there any that have information about this issue ? nevertheless great video keep it up ! truly helped me there !
is it possible to loop a sound? since they are only 3-4sec
thanks for the vdo Mark, one quick question, I see you mentioned making HA group of echos will allow playing the mp3 file. however, I've tried making the group (both in groups.yml and through helpers) it does not play the mp3 which is accessible fine on a browser.
Is there anyway of sending an announcement at a specific volume level? Some Alexa apps play very loudly so I adjust the volume on my device when using that app. Then when a notification triggers I don't hear it. :(
How do you add volume up control to announce the sequence and then once the sequence has completed let the volume of alexa resume to the original volume before the sequence ran? Great channel and learning heaps from your vids.
great video as always! my sound alert on alexa and TTS via the mini media player card works but calling the notify service fails. any idea why?
Hi Mark, with the TTS i left a comment on the part 1 video about having it go to all the Alexa's in addition to this, i would like preset buttons that will send out pre set sentance to all the Alexas, is this possible?
Amazing thx so much
Glad to have helped!
For the TTS I notice that it always uses the default alexa female voice instead of the voice thats setup on the alexa. Is there a way to change this for TTS?
Yep you sure can use saml in your code to change the voice of Alexa
Is there any known bug at the moment with TTS and Alexa?
I've followed your videos and tried a bunch of different methods online, however nothing works.
Within home assistant cloud I also try out the sample tts feature, it'll work fine playing through the browsers but it will not play anything on my Alexa devices :(
I literally heard a monorail announcement chime last night and thought - if only I could somehow capture that and have it as my announcement chime on Home Assistant and less than 24 hours I've got just that - thanks to you Mark! You're an absolute legend. But how can you do more than one sound effect. Do you just keep repeating the process and adding them to the services YAML? I'm rather new to this. Thanks!
Heya :)
You can either write a loop or as an alternative use a custom mp3 of your sound (also did a video on that). I prefer the mp3s as you can easily start and stop the track with automations.
you can also use type: routine to start a routine. Did you know if is possible to send a command to alexa like a question, in other words ask alexa something (i.e. "what the time is it?") with a service call?
You can yes :)
Check the Alexa documentation and there are examples for this.
Hello, having an issue today with alexa media player integration, getting this error : configflow could not be loaded: 500 internal server error. 😢.
Hi Mark, first thank you for this nice video! Is there a way to do this on more than 1 device? TTS to two or more Alexa speakers at the same time?
You can use the announce feature which will broadcast on all devices. You can also make use of the new run in parallel action to have multiple speakers go off (parallel may not necessarily be in sync though).
how do i use text to speech using my pi's audio output? i don't have any echos and i don''t want any because they require the internet.
If you head into your addons you can add the VLC media player. You can then target the Pi as a Media player and output the sound :)
by the way, I never saw this covered but how many Alexa smart speaker should I have ? is it overkill to have one in every room? because it's nice to be able to trigger automations in every room. since If there was a room I was in and let's say there was no Alexa speaker then I wouldn't be able to trigger automations ? what you think ?
Personally I have them in every room 😂. Its great for music, notifications and of course voice control
Cool 🤔
Does "type: announce" only work on true Echo devices? I'm trying it on a Sonos One which has Alexa built in and TTS works, but I can't get an announcement with a sound at the beginning.
It will also work on Sonos devices that are setup as alexa devices. In your alexa list you should have a device imported as your sonos alexa. This will be the device you target and not the standard sonos one (if using the sonos integration).
Using the Sonos with its standard TTS works much quicker than the alexa one btw and has 0 setup if your sonos is integrated via the sonos integration.
@@MarkWattTech Mark, thanks. Yes I have the Sonos integration as well and I carefully named the Alexa portion so I could tell them apart. TTS works but Announce doesn't. However, I'm thinking an alternative is to just play a sound effect at the beginning of the TTS message to achieve the same effect as "announce". Not sure why I can't get announce working :/
10:45 Is there a way to play and download the TTS sound file of what Alexa spoke after you type some text in? Example: Alexa says "Today is a wonderful day" --> Generate and download a audio file of Alexa speaking that sentence.
As in to download them to reuse them again as mp3s etc? :)
@@MarkWattTech Exactly
Can I just check, are you now able to send TTS to Sonos speakers using the notify Alexa? I've not been able to do this, only to actual Amazon devices. Thanks.
You can use tts on sonos directly (without alexa). If you setup your Sonos to use Alexa as the voice assistant you will get a sonos media player in the alexa integration that you can target. That the entity I target throughout the video and it works great.
The only issue is Sonos devices cannot be grouped with Echos (in Alexa app only). You can create a HA media group though.
Hope that helps?
@@MarkWattTech interesting. Mine all show up in the list of devices but I cannot get them to play any TTS from Alexa. When I had the Nabu Casa subscription going I could use their cloud TTS service, but still not Alexa. I must be getting something wrong somewhere.
Hello Mark
I have been using tts with Alexa Media Player without any problem for more than a year. But a few weeks ago Alexa Media Player stopped working although I did not change anything. All the Alexa Media Player connected identities now have the status 'not connected'.
This is very annoying as I have several automations that use tts notifications that do not work anymore.
Do you have an idea what could be the reason this and how to fix it?
I always immediately do any updates that are indicated.
Problem solved. There was an error in an incorrectly entered Amazon region domain in the Alexa Media Player configuration. I still don't understand why that error suddenly popped up even though I hadn't made any changes to the configuration...
Thank you for sharing. Glad you managed to resolve it. There was an update a little while ago, possibly could have been caused by that.
Thank you Mark. This could be the cause. In the meantime I'm glad that all my tts applications are working properly again
@@Tafmie Thank you - this was my issue too!
Can i use Alexa in Myanmar
is it possible to change the type from tts to announce if the target is a group
maybe something like :
if {{ who }} equals media_player.everywhere type = announce else tts ??
any help would be greatly appreated
alexa_tts_example:
alias: Alexa TTS Test 1
sequence:
- service: notify.alexa_media_kitchen_dot
data:
data:
type: tts
method: speak
target:
- media_player.kitchen_dot
message: "This is an example of text-to-speech"
Still waiting for part 3 😓
Can we get part three please 🙏
Is there a similar wiki page for Google TTS ?
I don’t think so
is it possible to randomize various custom/local MP3 using this method? I was able to randomize text or messages but to play random MP3 from local is throwing me for a loop.
You can indeed :)
I do show some examples of this in my previous custom mp3 tutorial
@@MarkWattTech Thank you. I seen that video too and my mind did not register at the time. Thank you for all the knowledge you are sharing.
I thought part two was going to have how to have home assistant trigger Alexa routines. I didn't see this?
As I mentioned in the video. That will he part 3
Hello when is part three due out?
You don't need to do "type: tts" anymore. Works fine without this for both text to speech and sounds.
could get the TTS and sound effects to work but the sequences wouldn't
Great video. Could do with adding a bit about getting Alexa to ask a question and then handle a response :D
Actionable notifications is it’s whole own video 🤪. It’s a bit of a setup. I have previously covered it but will refresh it at some point 👍🏻
Thanks as always Alex! 😁
@@MarkWattTech I had watched the previous video and bookmarked it to come back to but then forgotten about it 🤦🏼♂️. You expect me to remember stuff from a year ago?! How about instead of actionable notifications, being able to setup a voice command on Alexa and it then run an automation for you in HA.
@@AlexBoltonKing if you create a script in HA, say, "My Script" and expose it to Alexa then you can say: Alexa, run My Script. If you don't like saying "run" then you can make an Alexa routine and use some other command.
Alexa media player keeps asking for 2 factor authentication after every few minutes, otherwise my automation does not work. Would you have any idea about this?
You need to set it up with an app password so it won’t do this. See my part 1 video.
Custom mp3s are no more working
Alexa says I have trouble accessing ur Simon says EU skill right now, and yes I have the bit rate reduced using audacity and the link is working perfectly when opened through a browser
Used the file from Jovo, but still the same error message
All of mine are working using this exact method
I am having the exact error as well.
@@MarkWattTech It may be working for nabu casa ID. but its defiinitely not working for duckdns url
Same issues here. I've tried several different sources and am getting the same 'Simon says' error.
@@tomperry3788 Found a method. Using external link created by Cloudflare tunnel. Check in youtube u will find videos to do that
In 2 years you've went over everything except how to run alexa routines. What a waste of time
@markwatttech . Cool stuff. I tried messing with NTTS one day but I never got it working.
Have you ever tinkered with it?
I have had a play with NTTS and things like Polly. There's a bit more setup involved and a subscription. However I've found I really like the HA Cloud TTS voice and it says things perfectly so I would personally just use that if I didn't have echoes everywhere.
your GitHub link is incomplete!
And a question, if the "DEV SOUND" i chose has 4 seconds length how can i make it sound longer?
Is it? 😬 - ill fix it now
Hmm it looks like its an issue with the Url being long. Only not working on some devices. Added a short link. Failing that just checkout MarkWattTech on GitHub :)