@os2mac , welcome to the community!
As you have deduced, things are a little fluid with EchoSpeaks at the moment, given that there are ways to host a local server with another device as mentioned by @HAL9000 , as well as being able to still use the Heroku service (now for a fee of course). Adding to the mix is that the EchoSpeaks developer @tonesto7 , has been promising a new version (since the time of the Heroku announcement a number of months ago) that can be hosted solely on the Hubitat Hub. Please do not contact him about this as he has understandably been very busy in developing this as, well as his βrealβ work and life and has admonished us in the community for our impatience, lol).
Because I trust @tonesto7 to deliver on his promises (he is an incredible contributor to the HE community), although I have an RPi to try the docker container, I am waiting for @tonesto7 βs all HE version. I would ultimately like to keep things in Hubitat, keeping additional hardware to a minimum, so in the meantime, I have reverted back to my most used and important announcements working directly with the Amazon Echo skill (like it was prior to my using EchoSpeaks) using virtual contacts as @HAL9000 suggested. The beauty of EchoSpeaks is that you can avoid quickly run up against the 200 routine limit in Alexa (one routine is needed for every announcement you wish to make).