This new Alexa skill let’s you push notifications to your Echo with whatever message you want: Notify Me
They are normal notifications (a “bing” sound followed by an illuminated light ring) so Alexa doesn’t speak your message without “what are my notifications” prompting. But, still quite useful for home automation, I think.
Details can be found at www.notifymyecho.com
I’d love to see if anyone here gets it working with SmartThings. It at least works via IFTTT’s Webhooks service.