in today's video we're going to be setting up an alexa and home assistant
i'll also be showing you how to integrate your speakers and we're running through a couple
of features like text-to-speech and media controls check it out
what's going on guys i hope you're all doing well okay before we get started there's a couple
of things that i'm assuming that you've got or that you've done in order to actually follow
along with this tutorial so first of all i'm going to be assuming that you've got an amazon
account with your devices linked to it and that that account is two-factor authenticated if it's
not it will need to be in order to follow along and there'll be a link in the description that
you can go and follow in order to set two factor authentication up for your account
next i'm going to be assuming that you've got the home assistant community store or hacks
set up and installed now this isn't a full requirement for this video as you
don't necessarily have to do these things this is more for the extra parts but i'm not covering the
installation of hacks so if you want to follow along with those bits then you will need that
and the final one is that you're an abu casa user making use of the home assistant cloud
now you don't have to be an abu casa user in order to actually set this all up and you can
do it by making use of free alternatives but using naboo casa and the home assistant cloud is by far
the easiest way as always this video will be chaptered so if there's a particular part that you
care about then you'll find the timestamp in the description below jumping straight in we're here
on our dashboard and the first thing that we're going to need to do is to just enable the echo
service so let's do that now so from here we're just going to go ahead and click configuration
then up at the top you should see the home assistant cloud so go ahead and select that one
that's then going to take us into the home assistant cloud page and from here you're
going to just need to scroll down until you find the echo card and in this little card you'll see
a little toggle button and you're just going to want to toggle that on you'll notice that when
you do that it will tell you that the echo is not yet activated so what we'll need to do is
just to set up the home assistant skill within the echo app so let's do that now on our phones
then we're going to open the echo app and in the bottom right corner we're going to select more we
can then choose the fifth option down which is skills and games and from here we're going to
do a search for home assistant so just select the magnifying glass in the top right corner
and then simply type home system home assistant should then pop up and we can just select it
and then just hit enable to use from here you're going to need to enter the credentials for your
naboo casa account so go ahead and enter those and then hit sign in once you've done that you
should hopefully see the message saying your home assistant account has been successfully linked
and you can just go ahead and click close back in home assistant if we refresh this page now we
should see that state change and when that changes you'll see a new toggle for enable state reporting
and i would recommend you keep that toggled on we can now press this manage entities button and
it's going to show us all the different entities and devices that we can expose to our amazon echo
by default here i can see that home assistant is currently exposing 18 different entities to the
amazon echo now it's done this by itself i haven't told it to do it but i might not necessarily want
all of these to actually be exposed so let's say for example i didn't want these bed lights to
be exposed to the echo what you could do is just select this little green icon and just hit don't
expose entity this is then going to remove that from the amazon echo so it's no longer exposed and
won't be accessible through the echo and the same applies really if you want to expose an entity
to the echo so if we just scroll down a bit we've got a list of all the entities that are currently
not being exposed so if i wanted to just expose one of these i could just select that icon again
but this time just hit expose if you were wondering how all these different entities
were exposed without me manually doing them it's to do with the different managed domains
so if we click manage domains in the top right there that's going to show us a list of all the
different domains that are available within home assistant and that can be automatically exposed
to the echo so by default you can see that the fan the light the scene the sensor and switch
are all exposed and what this essentially means is that any new entity that you add to home assistant
that falls into one of these different domains will just automatically add and sync to your echo
without you having to manually come and select it and then just choose expose so for example
if we added a new light to home assistant and this light domain was turned on that light would
just automatically add to the echo and then i could control that from my voice then or from
the echo app or without having to do this manual process and it's entirely up to you which domains
you turn on and off so for the purposes of this demo i'm just going to toggle all of these off
in the background there behind this menu i can see that i've still got two
entities exposed and those two are the two that i manually exposed so i can see that that office
safe is a temperature sensor so if i just hit reset entities here what this will do is just
reset all the entities in that domain based on whatever this toggle is so if i hit that there
i can see that that's got rid of the one that i manually set and if i do the same with the input
button that i set i can now see that i've got zero exposed so just to recap that this reset entities
can be used as a quick way of toggling on or toggling off all the entities within a particular
domain so if i was to turn this light on here and hit reset entities it would expose all the lights
that i have in home assistant to the echo and if i turned it off and hit reset entities it would
disable all the lights and not expose them so that we've got some entities to play with let's
go ahead and expose those lights to the echo so we can just toggle that on and hit reset entities
when we do that we'll see a pop-up on our device telling us that the echoes found new devices
so in this case i can see that i've got six new lights found and that's pretty much the
gist of sharing your entities from home assistant to your echo okay so we can now
control our home assistant entities using our voice or using echo routines or even the echo
app if that's something that you wanted to do but what about if we wanted to control the individual
media players so for example if we wanted to play music or have the echo say something
or even do things such as control the volume to do all of those cool things we're going to need to
make use of an integration that's only available in hacks and again assuming that you've got this
all set up and installed we're going to open up hacks and at the top we're going to choose
integrations in the bottom right there we're going to press the big blue button that says explore and
download repositories and from here we can just do a search for our repository so if we start typing
that should then just automatically populate in the list so we can go ahead and select it
and choose download this repository and then hit download again if we just dismiss the
new repositories here that will just clear the list and only show us the repositories
that we currently have installed and i can see the echo media player here and it's telling us
that it's pending a restart so from here if we just hit the back button in the top left we'll
see again it's telling us that it's pending that restart and if we just hit this navigate button
that's going to jump us over to our server control and from here we can just hit that restart button
once your home assistant comes back to life we're going to add that new integration that we just
added so let's go ahead and click configuration and then devices and services we can then hit the
blue add integration button in the bottom right corner and do a search for the echo media player
and as you start typing that again that should populate in the list and we can just select it
if when you're searching for it it's not appearing in the list then more than likely it's a browser
cache issue and all you'll need to do to get it to appear is just clear your cache
the simplest way of doing this is just by hitting the control key and hitting f5 that should just
take a minute for it to run through the setup and once that completes it'll pop up a page asking to
fill in all the configuration information go ahead and enter your email address and the password
used for your amazon account and then you want to also make sure that your amazon region is correct
so i'm based in the uk so i just need to update mine from amazon.com to amazon.co.uk
before we move any further we're now just going to set up a built-in two-factor authentication
app key for the echo media player and what this is going to allow us to do is just re-authenticate
this media player with our amazon account without having to constantly enter a one-time password
to do this we're going to head over to amazon and we're going to navigate to our account
and from here we're just going to choose login and security
and from here just next to the two-step verification we're going to hit this edit button
you'll then see an option here for authenticator app and we're going to click add new app
we'll then be asked about adding a second two-step verification authenticator but
rather than scanning the qr code we're going to select this can't scan the barcode option
that's then going to give us a key based representation of that so we're just going to
highlight it and copy it to our clipboard we can then head back into home assistant and in the app
key box we're just going to paste the contents of our clipboard we can then just scroll down and hit
submit you'll then hopefully get a confirmation and in that confirmation you'll have a one-time
password code so we just need to copy that to our clipboard and back on our amazon page we're going
to want to paste that code in and then hit verify and continue we're now done with the amazon page
and if we come back to home assistant we just need to select this box for the app key confirm
and then hit submit when you hit that submit as part of the final confirmation it should just
ping you over to amazon where you'll just need to sign in again just to confirm your credentials
so go ahead and enter your amazon email address and password and then hit sign in as you're now
signing into amazon from a different source and you've got two-step verification enabled
you will need to enter a one-time password using your authenticator app or whatever you usually use
for your amazon authentication and that will be the code that we enter here so this code is not
that code that we just had a second ago it's a new code from your authenticator so get that code and
then go ahead and hit sign in once you hit that sign in button it should just take a second to
load and once it does you should hopefully see the success message and from within here you'll
be able to see all of your echo devices that are connected to your amazon account at this point if
you wanted to you could also assign each device to a set area by making use of the drop downs
i'm not going to bother with that and i'm just going to scroll down and hit finish let's start
off by having a look at one of the devices so i'm just going to select the devices here
and from this list i'm just going to choose one of my echoes so let's just go for aurora's echo
then in here i can see all the different controls that i have access to for aurora's echo as well
as the different sensors so here i can see what the echo is currently doing and it's currently
doing nothing so it's just in standby mode we've then also got the volume slider and also a do not
disturb switch the volume slider as you guessed it when you slide this up and down it's going to
toggle the volume of the echo that you target in and the do not disturb switch when you turn this
on it's going to stop any incoming announcements or calls and just block them from actually playing
out loud you'll also notice these other controls and sensors that are currently set as unavailable
or grayed out and that's just because they're not currently accessible as the echo is not using them
so if i was to set a timer or an alarm they'd actually appear here here i've swapped over to
my office sonos and you can see that i've got some of those sensors set so you can see i've got an
alarm i've got a reminder and also a timer just on the right there you can see when those things are
actually going to kick in so these are the times for when those events are going to trigger and if
you wanted to you could also write an automation and a script to actually act when these things do
you can also click on them to find out more information so for example i could select
the reminder and i could go into the control and then i could view the attributes of that reminder
so i could actually find out what the actual reminder was so if i just scroll down there on
the bottom you can see that reminder and the same goes for the alarm i could select it and go into
the control and then into the attributes then just scroll down and i can actually find out what the
time is for when that alarm is going to go off so that particular alarm is going to go off at 4pm
if you happen to be playing any media on your echo you'll also see it appear in here so you
can see back on aurora's echo we're currently playing some music and if we select the control
for that we can actually see what media is playing so i can see here what actual songs play in i can
see when it started playing you also get access to the album art for that song which is nice
you've then also got the normal controls so you can pause it you can go back you can go forwards
and again you've got that volume control to wrap this up we're going to cover one final
feature and it happens to be my favorite feature of this integration and that's text to speech
so with text to speech you can type some text or you can have some pre-written text and have home
assistant pass that to the echo and then the echo will play that and announce it on its speakers
this is a tts notification if you've been following along you'll see that when we click
the media controls it's got this option here for text-to-speech and when you type something
in here and click play you'd expect it to play on the echo speakers but it doesn't
what actually happens is the echo announces that it's not able to make use of this and you need to
use the notify service so i'm going to show you now how you go about doing that to show you how
to make use of text-to-speech i'm going to be making use of the developer tools just to give
you a quick demo so head into developer tools and then up at the top you're going to click services
then the service that we're going to want to use is the notify service so under service you're
going to want to start typing notify and as you start typing that it should start populating with
a list of all the different notified options that you have so this is a brand new home assistant for
me and i've got lots of different echoes and you can see them all appearing in this list
here so if i wanted to i could just select one of these and i'm just going to find my office echo
and i'm going to make use of that so i've got the office sonos there and i'm just going to choose it
and as you can see here this is going to send a notification message to the speaker that we chose
to send our notification message we're going to need to fill in a couple of sections here first
of all we're going to need to fill in the message so the message is the body of the notification
and essentially what this means is whatever you type in this box is going to be what's said
so go ahead and write something in there the next parameter is a title but as this is going to be a
text-to-speech notification there's not really going to be a need for a title so we can leave
that one following that we've got a target now for this example we're only targeting the particular
media player that we've chosen the service for so in my case it's going to be my office sonos so we
can skip target and the final parameter then is data so with data we need to tell the notification
what type of notification it is so our type of notification is a text-to-speech notification
and i'm just going to fill that in here so we need to write type colon
tts and that's pretty much the foundations for a basic text-to-speech notification so if we go
ahead and click that call service button we should hear whatever's written in that message body
this is a great demo and yes it was a great demo so that's basically it and if you wanted
to take that and use it in an automation it would be very easy to do if you wanted
to you could just rewrite what you had there or if you was to choose the go to yammer mode
that will give you the code representation of what that is and you could just copy and paste
that then into an automation but as this is such a simple one you could just easily type that out
again and as you can see from an automation perspective it looks exactly the same so with
an automation you'd set your trigger and then in your action you'd use the same thing so you'd set
the notification service and then you'd also set the data the type and your message and there we
go guys that's been a look at how we set up alexa home assistant and how we make use of some of the
features like text-to-speech and media controls this video is the first part of a couple of videos
that i'm going to be doing so this one was mainly all about the setup and just a couple of little
features but in the next video we'll be looking at sequences routines and how to do things like
play music sound effects and much much more if you have enjoyed this video then don't forget to
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patreon in the description below so thank you for watching and i'll catch you in the next one cheers
you