I am coming from SmartThings because all the cool kids are here!
What I want is when my water sensor detects a leak to turn off my water and alert my phone and do a announcement on all my Amazon echos. Everything works but the echo part.
What's the magic spell?
In Audio Alerts section I tried the obvious and set
"Message to speak" and put in my message. I selected my echo device. This worked!
But that's only on one device.
Next I tried selecting all 9. Oh that was bad. It was a round robin of alerts all over the house. Almost like a rate limiter. It took several minutes for the round robin to stop. Haha.
Next I tried picking a WHA / Alexa speaker group I called everywhere. Nothing happened. HE log says it does not understand the command. I guess the WHA is only for music.
Next I tried putting in "message to speak" a command like this: announcementall::Warning There is a leak. I picked just 1 device. It read the whole command out loud on that one device. Not what I hoped for from testing commands in the Echo speaks app.
Next I tried "Set track name to play" and type in announcementall::Warning There is a leak and selected 1 device. Nothing happened. Log says something about not finding that in the music service.
Ok, so is HSM not going to work and do I need to start playing with Rule Machine? It would be a bummer as HSM is so close to where I want it.
I feel like there is a missing option to send a raw command to a audio device or something like that.
In the native all ALexa app, the command is "announce."
In echo speaks, using the custom "Play Announcement All" (sent to one of your devices) command seems to work. The parameter should be a string and contain your announcement text.
I added a piece to this puzzle - @bptworld has a great app called Follow Me. You can target the sound to be where you are (or were). You can also (and I can't prove this) use the MusicSynthesizer feature to speak at 'WholeHouse' which is how I think Alexa sync's music playback when commanded via 'Play ac/dc let there be rock from Plex on WholeHouse' works...
Maybe picture is worth 1000 words? I tried various commands here. Nothing seems to work. I am sure there are other apps or rules I could write. But was hoping HSM app had a magic spell that would work with Echo Speaks devices.
So, I can't really complain as Echo speaks is free. It's also possible (the documentation is scant) there is a way in HSM, Rule Manager or Notifications app to send a Alexa announcement that goes across all devices without turning into a popcorn round robin mess.
I can say is HSM is not very consistent. For example you can have water alerts repeat. However you can't in custom alerts in HSM. You end up splitting rules between hsm and Notifications because of this inconsistent behavior.
I am not sure how I feel about HSM, Notifications and Rule Manger being separate.
Also, is there a way to go just to code. As a developer I have a hard time thinking in Rule Manager by poking UI "insert rule here". Give me an ide! I know web core... Maybe some day.
