hello. i am running echo speaks with multiple echo spot gen2s in my home. the problem started sometime in the fall of last year, 2025. i noticed that my echo spots would have a black screen. alexa would respond, and sometimes the display would come back, but often, the only way i knew at the time to make the display come back was to physically power cycle. this is not a display on/off problem, because using the physical button controls to turn the display on/off did nothing. thinking it was an alexa issue, i went thru many frustrating chats with amazon who basically just told me to update my firmware (all current) and to just power cycle (gee thanks amazon!)
over time, i discovered that i could use the voice command "alexa, go home" and that would bring the display back from the black screen. again, nothing was wrong with the echo spots during black screens, you could still issue alexa commands and it would respond. and this did not happen with any pattern that i could discern or reproduce. it did not happen on all of my echoes at the same time, or even certain ones all of the time.
most recently, i have noticed that when triggered events (garage door closed announcement, presence sensor announcement of kid coming home, etc.) that the screen somtimtes would black out. these are triggered events in rule machine and then using the run custom command parallePlayAnnouncement(). i am 99% sure that parallePlayAnnouncement() from the echo speaks app are causing the display to go black screen. it is not specific to a rule or trigger or to a specific echo.
i tried to use rule machine to create a rule to run custom command voiceCmdAsText('Alexa, Go Home.') and put that into various RM rules i have, but that command did not bring the screen back like an actual voice command to the echoes.
any insight what might be going on?
edit: apologies if i put this in the wrong category. if a mod could help file in the proper one if this is not the right place, i would appreciate it.
I probably would have posted it on the developer's thread ([RELEASE] Echo Speaks V4), but the category is good. First I've heard of a command blanking out a screen (although I used to do something similar as a prank back when I was a wee bit younger ), but maybe @tonesto7 has some ideas on it.
I have an Echo Spot that I do not use with Echo Speaks. I periodically find that the screen goes dark on it. It is a known issue that Amazon has done nothing to address. You can Google it. I don't believe your black screen issue has anything to do with Echo Speaks.
my initial reaction was that it was a spot/amzn issue as well. yes, i have seen the issue on amazon forums. however recently i rebuilt a front door open/closed announcement and had to do a lot of testing since the rule repeats and has exceptions, and i noticed during testing that MANY times when the parallelPlayAnnouncement() fired, the echo spot would immediately go black screen. that is what led me to echo speaks. i can reproduce the black screen at least 50% of the time i fire a parallelPlayAnnouncement(). i understand this could be some deeper issue within the device or amzn, and echo speaks could be triggering it.
edit: thinking further, it makes sense that it is an amazon/spot issue. i bought all of my spots when they were released in summer 2024. i did not have any issue with echo speaks or blank screens until around fall/winter 2025. and i am pretty sure echo speaks has not had any changes during that time.
I was going to say I have a echo spot and it doesn't have this problem, but the only Spot I have is in our bedroom and I don't send house wide announcements to it. I have a announcement Zone set up and the spot is excluded. I use PlayAnnouncementAll.
I do send Echo speaks announcements to the bedroom spot but I just use the speak command. I have never seen it go blank. I am about to head out but If I get a chance later I will send an house wide announcement and see what happens.
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