Alexa Changing Status as a Trigger

[stephen_nutt]

I am working on a project mentioned on another thread but I had a question outside of that so I created a new topic to get more .

Is anyone using the status of Alexa as a trigger? I am using Echo Speaks and it can take up to 30 seconds for Alexa to update it's status to "playing" after starting to play music. Up to around 5 seconds is tolerable for what I am trying to do but not 30. My Echos on my ST hub so I am curious if that might be the problem.

[april.brandt]

Whatcha up to?

I tried everything to get my echos to respond or report without a light sensor @stephen_nutt. I have my echos paired to my hubitat and echo speaks on Smartthings. You're still going to get latency with what is spoken, but it's usually only a few seconds. Perhaps you can swap that around? That's easy enough. Maybe you'll get a quicker response.

[stephen_nutt]

I'm happy with using the light sensor to trigger another light on when Alexa is talking like you did. That was creative and I never would have thought of it. However, I want the secondary light to stay on it if I ask her to play music. To do that, I have to have the secondary light stay on for 30+ seconds just in case I asked her to play music before turning off. I'm greedy. I want to be able to turn light off secondary light within 5 seconds of her talking if all I did was ask for weather forecast. I know others use dashboards tiles that show what track is playing but for me, those don't update very quickly either when track changes. I'm just curious if other people are getting faster response times.

If there were faster response times, I can think of some other things I could do outside of the radio project.

@tonesto7 Does Echo Speaks have to poll devices to get status or are updates sent when the Echo decides to send them?

This was April's cool project that inspired the question:

Automated Classic Radio

Ok, I just did a proof of concept using a NodeMCU board and a BH1750 sensor. $20 for 2 of each on Amazon. I used a power supply I already had. It works great! The sensor is currently just taped to the top of Alexa so that lux is 0. The highest reading I have seen generated when she is talking is over 300 but it spends most of the time around 50. That's definitely high enough to use as a trigger. Now to determine if the smaller lights on a Google Home Mini will work and to see if I can "bor…

[april.brandt]

I when I have her play music, I have her fip a secondary switch through a routine set up in alexa. I've been trying to figure out a way to get this to work without having to do something like that, but I just don't have the programming and electronics background to do so. I hope you find a way. Move echos to HE and echo speaks to smartthings. Have them communicate through hubconnect that way. You'll be happier with the outcome. I know that I am. Just a thought.

[stephen_nutt]

@april.brandt

Move echos to HE and echo speaks to smartthings. Have them communicate through hubconnect that way.

I don't understand this. I have Echo Speaks on ST and it finds my 4 Alexa devices on my home network. I then use Hubconnect to create Hubconnect Speakers on HE. Do you connect the Echos to HE then sync to ST and Echo Speaks uses the virtual Echos on ST? If so, how do you connect Echos to HE?

[april.brandt]

Using the amazon echo skill
[EDIT]
Then I only expse what I need exposed through that app. So i expose virtual switches to control things in HE and then anything spoken uses hubconnect to speak it through echo speaks which is installed on smartthings. Clear as mud? Took me a while to wrap my head around that.