When available, users will be able to opt-in to notifications per skill using the Amazon Alexa App and will be alerted when thereās new information to retrieve by a chime and a pulsing green light on their Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, or Echo Show device.
This is good in general, but Iām not happy that the notification is exactly the same as the one for personal messages. They should change the color of the light.
Iām also a little disappointed that itās still going to require retrieval. Thatās fine for messages, but for event notifications Iād prefer that they just be played when received.
I agreeā¦ While this is good, users of EchoSistant already have this featureā¦
I donāt like it that we still canāt wake Alexa remotely.
Iād like it to be an optional setting per skill. So some would play automatically and some would wait to be retrieved depending on the userās preference. 
Even better.
That would be nice and ultimately ideal.
The big problem is, who has what messages? How do you know they are for you? Before you listen to them.
With each member of my family having a profile in EchoSistant, they just askā¦
Alexa, ask Jason what messages do I have?
Getting closerā¦
This new Alexa skill letās you push notifications to your Echo with whatever message you want: Notify Me
They are normal notifications (a ābingā sound followed by an illuminated light ring) so Alexa doesnāt speak your message without āwhat are my notificationsā prompting. But, still quite useful for home automation, I think.
Details can be found at www.notifymyecho.com
Iād love to see if anyone here gets it working with SmartThings. It at least works via IFTTTās Webhooks service.
I may try to get this working with Ask Alexa.
I would be extremely interested to know if you get Notify Me working with Ask Alexa.
The fact that this third party got permission to do notification may mean that native notification within Ask Alexa may be available soon. I am looking into it.
I used the WebCore āmake a web requestā task directly from SmartThings to the notifymyecho API and it appeared to work fine:
URL (value): https://api.notifymyecho.com/v1/NotifyMe?notification=Hello%20World!&accessCode=ACCESS_CODE
Method (value): GET
Content Type (value): FORM
Excellent, thanks.
I actually got this working with Ask Alexa:
Not as impressive as I had hoped.
First, and this is just meā¦the brandingā¦It will always say āFrom the NotifyMeā. While I can put Ask Alexa (or the app sending the data) into the title, I will always have to live with their branding.
Second, and this may be another āthat is just the way it isāā¦it is simply a toneā¦You have to ask Alexa for the notifications. Better than nothing, but was hoping some day we could do the talk on demand thing.
Not sure if anyone is interested in this, but I will continue to refine it and release it in a future version, but as was stated above, WebCoRE can do this as well, and the limitations above will still be there. It will be nice when Ask Alexa has a bit more control over the notifications.
If using webCoRE (or @MichaelS), couldnāt you just parse the response data, grab the relevant notification text, and then call a send to speaker via TTS action?
One of the functions of Ask Alexa is to be an aggregation for other partner apps within SmartThings (like Big Talker, Lock Manager, etc). So those apps ONLY have to write to Ask Alexa and then you can decide based on your Message Queue setup, WHERE the messages go. On the screenshot above you can have the option to send to Sonos Speakers (under Message Notification-Audio). You can also turn on lights when there are messages (Ask Alexa acts as a message mailbox) in the message queue. There are also options to push or SMS the messages it receives.
So, yesā¦it already does thatā¦I just wanted real time notifications (speaking) from Alexaā¦may have to wait 
Yeah, for now, all official Alexa notifications (A) Immediately emit a notification sound & message light but donāt donāt speak until prompted (the āanswering machineā model of ānotificationsā); and (B) Announce the name of the source skill prior to delivering the message (so skill developerās canāt pretend their messages are coming from some other source āHello, this is the IRS. Please send us your unpaid balance in prepaid gift cardsā¦ā).