Next steps for me is installing our Amazon Echo Dots all around the house. I've been doing proof of concepts with Voice Routines, which I've generally achieved by creating the routine on the Amazon Alexa App on my phone that activates a virtual contact sensor or a Room Lighting Activator Device in HE, which are made available through the Amazon Echo Skill app in HE. These work fairly well and generally happy with the commands I have so far.
However, I came across the "Echo Speaks" App and I'm not 100% sure what it actually does. There are a lot of guides on the implementation and they either mention paying for a Heroku account or creating a server with/without a docker. The more I read, the more it got complicated for me by the minute lol. Could someone please help me get to the big lightbulb moment and explain what the major advantages are of having "Echo Speaks" vs my current setup? It's definitely not clicking for me, so atm I feel it's not worth all the extra effort. I'd love to understand it more to see if I should learn how to set it up. Thanks in advance!
Echo Speaks allows you to send custom TTS to be spoken on whatever echo devices you select. You can use it as a notification device instead of (or on top of) sending alerts to your phone.
There are other things you can do with it also, but that is the core feature.
I mainly use it for very important alerts that repeat until issue is resolved, like if the garage door is open, water leaks detected, doors fail to lock, etc...
Ditto. AND saying Happy Birthday/Anniversary to us on those days when we enter the house. Just fun stuff like that. Echo Speaks and webcore are the backbone of my Echo devices environment.
If you do find Echo Speaks useful, toss a few dollars to the developer!
Ah okay! So, an example Use Case would be like, if your garage door is opened and has stayed open for x minutes, it will send a TTS from HE to your Echos that says "Garage door open." instead of just a phone notification. Does having Echo Speaks then exposes your Alexa Echo Dots in the notification devices in RM? That would be a lot more straightforward than me creating a "Alexa Says: Garage Door" virtual contact sensor, which then creates an "Alexa Says" Action.
If you want a really powerful way to construct an endless number messages in real time to be spoken by Alexa, Echo Speaks.
If there are a number of fixed messages such as "Water leak in hall bath!" that you want her to speak, and the number of them can be counted on your fingers and toes, I'd recommend skipping Echo Speak and just have that many routines in Alexa, triggered by contacts, to say those phrases.
Thank you! Maybe this will be one of those things I'll make a list of all the "Notification Rules" that I plan on having and like you said, if it's alot, then I'll go on and try to set up the Echo Speaks server.
I went this way after the Heroku server changes in Echo Speaks a while back. I really don't miss the futzing around with Echo Speaks.
For my 3-4 things I want spoken, it was quite easy to just create an Alexa routine, and form a couple rules in Hubitat to trigger those routines. Like HAL says, I would suggest using this method over E.S. if you only have a few basic items that need announcements, it is a much simpler method to achieve the same goal.
The community driver Universal Virtual Device Switch uDTH helps tremendously to change one device type to another, you can use this virtual device to easily create a contact sensor for Alexa.
The downside is that this all depends upon Alexa working properly, and there have been a handful of times over the past couple years where that routine did not function properly, apparently due to issues on Alexa's side of things. But I am not sure Echo Speaks would have been any different if the error was on Alexa? Either way, none of the stuff I am announcing is for critical life/safety stuff, and I also have text messages as a backup method.
If the virtual contact sensor makes sense to you, stick with that. There are some of us in the community who claim without evidence except for personal observation that about a year or so ago, Alexa started getting confused by virtual contact with switch, virtual motion with switch, etc. I have changed most of mine to single capability devices and never had one fail.
The only advantage of virtual xxx with switch is that you can use it to trigger routines in Alexa, but pretend it is a switch in Hubitat. But rather than turn a switch on or off, you can almost as easily set the contact to open or closed.
Ahhh okay! I do have two virtual prescence with switch that I use with Alexa's Geofencing as one of the checks we use in the Combined Presence App. I'll keep what you said in mind if that stops working!
Exactly this. You can use that virtual device as contact in one place, switch in another, and a smoke alarm in yet a different app all within one device instead of spreading it among 2-3 virtual devices.
Here is a screenshot of the variety of devices available within this one virtual "container" device.
