It’s funny that you ask this question because I just built a piston that does this exact thing. If any of the temp readings in the house raises about 75 switch the fans to medium. My away piston turns them all to low when we leave. The main reason I want the Alexa stuff is to improve the WAF and to get her using Alexa.
1 Like
Perfect! My WAF goes lower the more I use Alexa. She only likes it for music and the shopping list. 
My WAF and Alexa are like water and oil. They mix well. 
Yeah my wife is getting a little frustrated with it all. Her comment last night was that I spend all day on the computer at work and then I’m spending all night on it working on this stuff. She is liable to blow a gasket next week when the 2 dots arrive.
2 Likes
You guys are lucky.
My wife wrote a short story destroying all my Smart Home tech. It was mainly my Ubi’s fault and was the trigger for the story. We had to bury remains in the backyard in the middle of the night like the dead body of my high-tech mistress.
1 Like
I’m assuming you are talking about the device type, which I’ve linked below.
I replaced all my fan switches with these…
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001HT4M48/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Jason, does the above us a DLNA speaker to say this, or is the ask-alexa app saying it? I would love to use ask-alexa with CoRE integration to eliminate the need for an Android (Tiny Dancer) dedicated device for TTS. Is this possible?
I think he is using some ST connected speakers to speak to via CoRE. I can do the same with my Sonos.
1 Like
They are dlna speakers connected via st.
I am working on some other ideas for this as well. I’m trying to get Alexa to make the announcements… we will see.
1 Like
That would be awesome. I pretty much have a dedicated Amazon fire 7" dedicated for the dlna speaker. I bought it for SmartTiles anyway so not that big of a waste.
Is alexa initiating alarms? Can the alarm be a prompt? Can that be hacked into?
I’m thinking this…
Create a skill that is basically an invocation word… Let’s call it messenger to.
You say,
Alexa, ask messenger to tell the boys it’s dinner time.
Alexa - wakes the device
Ask - initiates the skill activity
Messenger to - is the skill
Boys - name of the dlna speakers in the boys’ rooms
Tell the boys it’s dinner time - text that I’d captured on the fly and directed to the keyworded speakers as tts
No more programmed tts! ! Tts in real time
1 Like
It would be awesome if Alexa could just pass the text after the ST invocation transparently and let ST deal with parsing it into commands…
2 Likes
She can…as long as you predefine phrases for her to match against.
Like it is dinner time
It is time for school
Etc
You would be surprised how few phrases you say to your kids…over and over again
1 Like
Dude… I have 8 kids… I don’t even want to say anything once!
1 Like
Aldi @N8XD I don’t want predetermined phrases.
Every time we speak to Alexa it is recorded and a card is generated.
Why can’t we intercept that card and redirect as needed? Then we have tts on the fly.
Well I was looking into this Myself as it would be great to send Alexa a command via a trigger instead of Voice Command, all documentation I found on the Amazon Developer Website is clear that a request can only be initiated via Voice interaction but then I found this IoS App : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ava-alexa-voice-service-edition/id1116883035?ls=1&mt=8
This seems to be sending Alex text commands instead of just voice through AVS?
Have not tried the App myself but from the description thats what is looks like?
I have been following some discussions in their forums (as this is apparently a very popular request) but I don’t think it will happen. Yes it would be simple for them to expose the device ID or location a request came form but apparently this is considered an No-No with their privacy policy.
1 Like
That’s the intriguing part on Android Listens app, they can send text to Alexa via keyboard, so it is possible. Now, we just need to figure how.