Indigo announcing around the house.

about a year ago I had the idea to put an amazon echo dot next to my mac mini and have Indigo request that Alexa announces things, examples like the back gate being opened of if I or my wife was home through geofencing. I was partially successful having Indigo speak things using the format (speak "Alexa,,, announce,,,the back gate is open"). The problem was sometimes the pause using multiple commas was to short or too long and the message would either get cut off (she would say "ck gate is open) or it was too long where she would just reply that she didn't hear anything. after playing with 2 commas vs 3 commas and different permutations I could never get it to be any better than working correctly 25% of the time (the goldilocks zone of 2.5 commas didn't exist) After putting the integration on pause due to work, I finally came back to it and started messing with it again, this time I had the idea to have the speak actions but to sue the delay action in indigo. to control how much time is in between what indigo says to Alexa. in our gate example it reads like this:
speak "Alexa"
speak "announce"; delay 00:00:02 #delay gives Alexa time to wake up
speak"the back gate is open"; delay 00:00:03 #delay gives Alexa time to say "what is the announcement" before speaking

This works 100% of the time which is awesome but iI wanted to take it further. Now that I have a way for indigo to talk to Alexa reliably(even if it is not elegant), I had one other thing to try, With the amazon echo environment, they store the recordings that the devices take for review for 30 days or longer unless you tell it every day to delete the day's recordings and if you forget well, you're screwed. Well not anymore. Armed with the new trick I made a schedule that at 11:59 pm every day Indigo commands Alexa to delete the day's recordings using the following action:
speak "Alexa"
speak "delete everything I said today"; delay 00:00:02 #delay gives Alexa time to wake up
speak"yes!"; delay 00:00:10 #delay gives Alexa time to say "you would like to delete the recordings of everything said to me today, is that right?" before speaking

Now my recordings are deleted everyday and I don't need to worry about forgetting to do it!

Awesome.


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[jay (support)]

Very clever...

I was on video w my son and said Alexa turn lights off and his apartment went dark.

dad’s magic remote powers

Karl

No Alexa etc in my house


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I toyed with your idea a while ago too. What I really wanted was to use a variable to store the spoken command and an action to say whatever was in the variable.

LIKE

I toyed with your idea a while ago too. What I really wanted was to use a variable to store the spoken command and an action to say whatever was in the variable.

That's pretty much the sole purpose of the Announcements Plugin. It allows you to be able to construct complex strings and store them in device states. The idea was that these state could then be used for spoken announcements. The plugin doesn't provide any voice engine, however. That's the "batteries not included" part.

An out of the box solution for whole house audio and announcements.

connect mac analog audio out to https://www.barix.com/instreamerice/. This will broadcast a radio station on your LAN. Tune in to this radio station via your favourite internet radio box.

There's a new solution for this. It requires a little bit of scripting but it overcomes the issue of the "Echo Ring" requiring you to have to ask for the announcement. Check it out herehttps://forums.indigodomo.com/viewtopic.php?f=138&t=20535&p=198183#p198183