OK, so there's many ways to skin a cat and I personally find this better than the solution for HomeAssistant and better than the ChromeCast Plugin ( it is for me, not here to start a debate). While I got HomeAssistant kind of, sort of working semi well I had issues with cookies and the interface (or lack there of) was limiting.
Chromecast works beautifully on a Google Home, but I'm stuck in the Amazon echo-system and using it for announcements having both in a box kind of works but the sound quality is poor and there's a long delay, so...
This solution requires Node-Red
Maybe you can port it, but then again, a PI Zero W is $5 so it's hardly worth the hassle even if you'd only run this application.
I find myself using it as a DB Writer between Homeseer and InfluxDB, I use it to pull weather from DarkSky, I have one as a 1W interface, etc. etc. so there's a lot of usages for it.
The Package is this:
https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-...-alexa-remote2
The nice thing about this package (which uses this package https://github.com/Apollon77/alexa-remote for Alexa functions) is that all the functions are easily accessed.
you can set up an event trigger that reports all events (i.e. if you tell Alexa to do something it will trigger an event that contains all the information about what just happened so you can capture it and build actions based on said events).
It has a built in proxy-login and generates it's own cookie if you use it, or you can enter the cookie manually once captured (easier that way if you do a lot of debugging since you have to enter your credentials every time you deploy your NodeRed settings).
You can issue different speak/TTS commands, "Speak" as the name applies had Alexa saying the text you send, "Announce" does the same thing but adds the dingdong notification (and only to the device you specify). If you don't specify a device, it will speak/announce on all devices automatically (no need for groups).
You can utilize Amazons SSML (https://developer.amazon.com/docs/cu...reference.html) so that you can change the way Alexa speaks (faster, slower, different pitch, volume, etc.) What I find "coolest" is that you can have her Whisper.
You can issue speak with volume commands so that it sets the device to a certain volume, says whatever it was you wanted it to say and then restores the previous volume,
this does not work for automatic "ALL" but it's useful for individual devices.
There's a home automation branch as well that I haven't had a chance to dig into, but the TTS portion alone is great.
I have a flow set up that reads MQTT commands from HomeSeer, so I can issue these... as an example...
Alexa/Announce/ALL=Good Morning Announces to All Devices
Alexa/Announce/Office=Good Morning Announces in Office
Alexa/Speak/Office=Good Morning Speaks in Office
Alexa/Whisper/Office=Good Morning Whispers in Office
Alexa/Announce/Office/100=Good Morning Announces in Office w. volume set to 100
Here's two different flows:
MQTT to Alexa.txt
If you prefer webhooks over MQTT you can create an event to run a script in HS:
&hs.URLAction("http://IPofNodeRed:1880/HS4?Action=Announce&Where=Office&Volume=20&SayWhat=Testing%2 0Testing", "GET", "", "")
WebHook to Alexa.txt
Chromecast works beautifully on a Google Home, but I'm stuck in the Amazon echo-system and using it for announcements having both in a box kind of works but the sound quality is poor and there's a long delay, so...
This solution requires Node-Red
Maybe you can port it, but then again, a PI Zero W is $5 so it's hardly worth the hassle even if you'd only run this application.
I find myself using it as a DB Writer between Homeseer and InfluxDB, I use it to pull weather from DarkSky, I have one as a 1W interface, etc. etc. so there's a lot of usages for it.
The Package is this:
https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-...-alexa-remote2
The nice thing about this package (which uses this package https://github.com/Apollon77/alexa-remote for Alexa functions) is that all the functions are easily accessed.
you can set up an event trigger that reports all events (i.e. if you tell Alexa to do something it will trigger an event that contains all the information about what just happened so you can capture it and build actions based on said events).
It has a built in proxy-login and generates it's own cookie if you use it, or you can enter the cookie manually once captured (easier that way if you do a lot of debugging since you have to enter your credentials every time you deploy your NodeRed settings).
You can issue different speak/TTS commands, "Speak" as the name applies had Alexa saying the text you send, "Announce" does the same thing but adds the dingdong notification (and only to the device you specify). If you don't specify a device, it will speak/announce on all devices automatically (no need for groups).
You can utilize Amazons SSML (https://developer.amazon.com/docs/cu...reference.html) so that you can change the way Alexa speaks (faster, slower, different pitch, volume, etc.) What I find "coolest" is that you can have her Whisper.
You can issue speak with volume commands so that it sets the device to a certain volume, says whatever it was you wanted it to say and then restores the previous volume,
this does not work for automatic "ALL" but it's useful for individual devices.
There's a home automation branch as well that I haven't had a chance to dig into, but the TTS portion alone is great.
I have a flow set up that reads MQTT commands from HomeSeer, so I can issue these... as an example...
Alexa/Announce/ALL=Good Morning Announces to All Devices
Alexa/Announce/Office=Good Morning Announces in Office
Alexa/Speak/Office=Good Morning Speaks in Office
Alexa/Whisper/Office=Good Morning Whispers in Office
Alexa/Announce/Office/100=Good Morning Announces in Office w. volume set to 100
Here's two different flows:
MQTT to Alexa.txt
If you prefer webhooks over MQTT you can create an event to run a script in HS:
&hs.URLAction("http://IPofNodeRed:1880/HS4?Action=Announce&Where=Office&Volume=20&SayWhat=Testing%2 0Testing", "GET", "", "")
WebHook to Alexa.txt
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