This would be great… I’ve got three echo in my house just for this reason…n but man are they pricey.
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You could buy the Fire TV Stick with Voice Remote. The remote is essentially a portable push-button module… Just make sure the device has power and you should be all set.
Normal price on this is $50. They do drop to $40-45 sometimes when the regular one drops down to $35.
I use a Fire TV stick in this manner as well. The downside it you get no voice feedback, you lose a lot of Echo’s capabilities. It’s fine if you just want to use it for HA with no feedback.
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If I’m using it for HA, I don’t necessarily need auditory feedback. If I want to turn off a light, I can physically see it happening so I get visual feedback.
It might be different for people with bigger places though.
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Agreed. I was just pointing out that you can’t use it to ask Alexa questions and get a response back. You lose most of her functionality with this setup. HA is just an add-on. I also use Alexa to control switches in other rooms and outside my house so I don’t get visual feedback. I just want users to understand it’s limitations if they choose to setup a Fire stick this way.
Yea. Even a light vibration of the remote or flashing of an LED on it would have been a good, cheap indicator.
What Amazon really needs to do is release a version of the Fire TV box with HDMI Passthrough, like a home theater receiver would have (or even the Xbox One). Set it up with a feature that will drop the volume on the TV when you hit the mic button to speak, returning to the original volume once Alexa has responded.
The Fire TV box is the source, why would it pass-through? They’re expecting all your content to come through it.
I get why it’d be handy, but in your example Microsoft has their Cortana effort targeted toward that.
Doing pass-through with HDMI is more headache than you might realize. It’s not just a simple on/off kind of thing. There’s handshaking going on and that’s a real rats nest of complexities.
That said, I’d buy it if there was an option.
Setting it up with pass-through would make it so you are ALWAYS on that input, meaning you’re more likely to use their service and continue using their service when it’s essentially an overlay to the rest of your entertainment (there are still some people out there who aren’t cord-cutters that use streaming services as a complement).
The Logitech Revue did it as an Android STB. If they had updated it beyond Honeycomb, mine would be in use still and I’d have no real need for a Fire TV.
Based on a lot of the comments here I think most people are conflating the Echo (the hardware/software in the “can” that you buy) with the Alexa Voice Service (“AVS”, the cloud-based service that the Echo accesses to implement most of its functionality). While it’s true that you can access AVS via other devices/software systems (or even develop your own solution based on it, via Amazon’s supported interface), as someone else has already pointed out, the Echo device itself is a very important part of the total experience delivered by the “Echo” product (the combination of the device and the AVS it uses).
Thread about the two new devices over here.
It seems all of the other Echo Dot/Tap conversations were closed, this must be where we are supposed to continue the discussion…
I thought that this was fun/interesting found on the “contact us” page under fire and kindle devices.
It seems the Amazon calls the Tap’s “Fox” and the Echo Dot’s “Pancake”
Continuing the discussion from Amazon Echo Dot is here!:
Continuing the discussion from [RELEASE] Amazon release new Echo Dot & Echo Tap devices!:
Continuing the discussion from Amazon echo dot:
Hahaha I hope I can use ‘Pancake’ as the wake word instead of Alexa! 
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