Echo Speaks Examples

Thanks! I use EchoSistant, too! But, honestly, I’m just building off the tremendous work tonesto7 and you have put into the Echo Speaks app. I was ready to give up on the Echos and was looking into DLNA speakers and other solutions when I found the beta for Echo Speaks. I’m not sure if you guys saved or cost me money because now I’ve outfitted my house with more Echos!

Cool, I was kind of wondering what this did as well. I just switched to iphone and have been playing around with Shortcuts. I had not gotten to integrating with webcore yet; so thank you for posting this! I think I will combine this with my heading home / ETA shortcut since kiddos don’t always see the text.

Thanks for using EchoSistant! I hope you get some great use from it.

EchoSpeaks is amazing and has rendered my DLNA speakers completely useless… lol. I have an Echo device in every room of the house and in my sons dorm room at college…

I’ve been using ST for 3 years… and the things that have been made possible because of this community are amazing!

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Do all of your Echos speak simultaneously when you clump them together like that? Because when I added more than one Echo, and used Speak; it only spoke on one of them. And not all of them.

So I ended up having to break them up individually.

I have a piston set up pretty much the same way, and all my Echo devices speak at the same time.

What app are you using, WebCore? You should paste your piston for us to see.

Thanks for the fast responses guys…I am using Webcore. My piston is extremely basic, as I am just getting into getting everything working. Attached is the Piston I am currently using that is working; however as you can see, I had to break it down into 3 With statements. Before, I had all the Echo’s in 1 With Statement, but then it did not speak on all of them??

Thanks for the fast responses guys…I am using Webcore. My piston is extremely basic, as I am just getting into getting everything working. Attached is the Piston I am currently using that is working; however as you can see, I had to break it down into 3 With statements. Before, I had all the Echo’s in 1 With Statement, but then it did not speak on all of them??

Web

That is strange that such a basic piston isn’t working for you.
This is how I handle my announcements. I do not want it going to every single device every time, so I created a “Message Control” piston:

Then, I use pistons like this to set the proper message and they trigger the Message Control piston to make the announcements.

as you can see with this, I use a multitude of pistons to make my announcements.

image

Since you said you are just getting started with WebCoRe I’ll give you some advice… Keep it simple. WC is extremely powerful and a whole lot can be done with just one piston. But trust me, when the troubleshooting starts you’re going to want it as simple as possible.

But, back to your problem. I’m not sure what’s going on with yours not playing on every device. Odds are you’re being rate limited by Amazon and for some reason your Queue isn’t correcting for it.

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That looks absolutely amazing man. But at the current moment a little above what I am capable of. But I want to work up to it.

Maybe you can help me out, or point me in the right direction… What I want to do is have the Echo say a random line, from a list of prefined statements.

So basically if the door opens, I’d like to mix it up a bit, and have it say, “Back door opened” or " Someone opened the back door" etc. Etc… I don’t really know what the statement would be yet. But is it possible to do such a thing?

Thanks man.

Here you go. This piston announces a random thing when someone arrives and when someone leaves.

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[bamarayne] I cannot thank you enough. I do have some basic coding knowledge, so by seeing this sample, I realized you could write expressions, which lead me to the random expression.

Take a look at what I am doing here, I have around 15 contact sensors, and what I am trying to do is when the temperature is a certain degree, and something opens, have the Echo speak a random expression. With that being said, I have 2 questions that perhaps you or someone else in the thread can shine some light one.

  1. Is there a simpler way, that I can go about putting in the multiple contact sensors into one Piston? As opposed to having to duplicate the piston over and over, and change the necessary variables?

  2. Is there a way, I can get the echo to speak the actual temperature that the nest is reading. So say i want it to say, “The back door is opened, it is 78 degrees outside, close it” With the 78 being the actual reading?

Again, thanks for all the help with this, this is a really powerful tool, and once I get a couple of things figured out, the sky is the limit.

Both are possible and relatively easy with the addition a few variables, and if I were near my PC I’d make a quick example piston for you. In the mean time, you might get better help for webCoRE questions on the webCoRE community forum.

Ok cool… thanks man… Sorry if I was pest.

Have a good holiday.

Yes! Variables!
Create a variable - ‘Doors’ and another ‘Windows’, or just have one… ‘Contacts’. Select the initial state as the physical devices. This is what I do in the following piston. You can also create a variable ‘Current Temp’ and select the nest device with the temp attribute. Add that into the expression and you should be good to go.

Hah! Not a pest at all, just thought it night be an additional helpful resource. There are a lot of people over there that are really helpful when it comes to creating and troubleshooting pistons.

Looks like Jason (bamarayne) has you covered with an example for variables. FWIW webCoRE has an integrated weather api, and I find it easier to use and faster than pulling from Nest for exterior temperature. Pretty sure they both use Weather Underground, so the data should be the same.

Yeah… I like my Netatmo weather station… when I walk out back and it says it’s 70 degrees… that means it is 70 degrees right where I’m standing! lol

That would be nice! But WU is free, and close enough for my use. Luckily it seems to always be within 1 degree of the thermometer on my back porch. I’ve seen stories about people having the WU reported temp up to 10 degrees off!

That’s awesome. You probably have someone with a weather station pretty close to you.

@bamarayne, thank you for your help. I am extremely grateful. After much trial and error, and some assistance I arrived at this…


Which I thought was a solid start for a novice like myself. However, something strange is happening and I really dont even know where to begin to troubleshoot it. If I have this piston active, and it runs, it completly locks up my Echo Speaks. Nothing will speak. I then have to go and reset my Heirako login, and things will start working again. I have no idea what could be causing this?

Just when I am thinking everything is going to be running smoothly for Xmas, this happens.