[RELEASE] Text to Alexa, "Tell me a joke","did Chelsea win?" or any question

[tgauchat (ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)]

@DougS

would like to have smartthings be able to send messages to be played or spoken by my Echo on command. I want to use this as a sort of alarm when the smart home monitor detects intrusion. To have the Echo say something repeatedly such as “Intrusion detected, police have been notified”

Is it possible to send text to be spoken by my Echo?

Amazon Echo not recognized as speech or music device in ST?

The Echo is currently not capable of doing this … i.e., it cannot initiate speech or music playback without the wake word and a verbal request from the user. Everyone is hoping this will change. The Echo supports Bluetooth playback, so perhaps the Hub V2 bluetooth chip will eventually offer this capability. Meanwhile, there are some complex (?) workarounds that involve running a VLC or other playback process with various speaker options, including Bluetooth connection to your Echo. Give the forum a search for those configurations.