Connect Flic buttons to Alexa

Flic buttons are tiny physical buttons you can stick anywhere — bedside tables, car dashboards, the underside of a desk. Each button supports three distinct gestures (single click, double click, long press), so one Flic can fire three separate actions.

Physical buttons shine when voice is awkward: discreetly triggering a "goodnight" Routine without waking your partner, a one-tap panic announcement across every Echo in the house, or a kids-friendly "play bedtime story" button for rooms where saying "Alexa" wakes the whole house up.

Flic buttons can make HTTP requests — directly from the Flic Hub LR (fully offline, no phone needed), or via the Flic mobile app's Internet Request action. That's where Voice Monkey comes in: a single HTTP call lets Flic fire an Alexa Routine or make any Echo speak.

The easy way: generate the URL in the Playground

Voice Monkey's API Playground builds the exact URL Flic needs. Choose Trigger or Announce, pick your device, compose the call, switch to the URL snippet tab and copy. Paste it into Flic and you're done — skip the rest of this page if you're in a hurry.

What is Voice Monkey?

Voice Monkey is an Alexa skill plus a small HTTP API hosted at api-v3.voicemonkey.io. It exposes two virtual device types that Alexa treats as real: Routine Trigger devices (virtual doorbells you can use as the "When" in an Alexa Routine) and Speaker devices (virtual Echoes you can make speak). Flic buttons — or anything that can make an HTTP request — can drive both.

Trigger an Alexa Routine from a Flic

1. Sign up to Voice Monkey and create a Routine Trigger device. See Add a device for the full walk-through.
2. In the Alexa app, create a Routine whose "When this happens" is your new Voice Monkey device. Set the action to whatever you want — lights, scenes, thermostats, another Routine, music, the lot.
3. Copy the trigger URL for the device from the Playground:

   https://api-v3.voicemonkey.io/trigger?token=YOUR_TOKEN&device=YOUR_TRIGGER_DEVICE_ID

4. In the Flic app (or Flic Hub LR config), assign the button gesture to an Internet Request action:
   • URL: paste the URL from the previous step.
   • Method: GET.
   • Leave headers and body blank.

Each press of the Flic button now calls Voice Monkey, fires the Routine Trigger device, and runs your Alexa Routine — usually within a second.

Make Alexa speak when you press a Flic

For text-to-speech without a Routine in the middle, use a Speaker device and the /announce endpoint.

1. Create a Speaker device in Voice Monkey and link it to the target Echo via the Alexa app (see Add a device).
2. Copy the announcement URL from the Playground — it looks like:

   https://api-v3.voicemonkey.io/announce?token=YOUR_TOKEN&device=YOUR_SPEAKER_DEVICE_ID&speech=Goodnight

3. Configure the Flic gesture as an Internet Request, method GET, using that URL. Change the speech query parameter to whatever you want Alexa to say.

The /announce endpoint also supports media (audio, video, images), voice and language overrides, chimes and on-screen text — see the full Announcement API reference.

Three actions on one Flic

A single Flic supports three gestures — you can map them to three different Voice Monkey calls:

• Single click: trigger the "goodnight" Routine (all lights off, thermostat down, doors lock).
• Double click: announce "Be right down, just getting the dog" on the kitchen Echo.
• Long press: run a Voice Monkey Flow that announces on every Echo in the house — useful as a panic / "kids, dinner!" button.

Worked example: bedside goodnight button

1. Create a Routine Trigger device called Goodnight in Voice Monkey.
2. In the Alexa app, build a Routine triggered by Goodnight that turns off the landing light, locks the front door and sets the thermostat to 18°C.
3. Stick a Flic to your bedside table, assign its single click to GET https://api-v3.voicemonkey.io/trigger?token=…&device=goodnight-device-id.
4. Tap once — lights out, door locked, room cooling.

Tips

• Create a dedicated Voice Monkey API token at app.voicemonkey.io/tokens for your Flic buttons so you can revoke it independently if a button goes missing.
• The Flic Hub LR can make HTTP requests directly over Wi-Fi, so your buttons keep working even if your phone is off — pair it with Voice Monkey for a phone-less Alexa remote.
• Need branching logic, multiple announcements in sequence, or waits between steps? Have Flic hit POST /flow and build the logic as a Flow instead of crowding it into Flic.
• Append var-NAME=value to any URL to upsert a variable in the same request — handy for passing context (e.g. which button was pressed) into a downstream Flow.

Ideas for Flic + Alexa recipes

• Kitchen "dinner's ready" button. One tap announces on every Echo upstairs.
• Front-door doorbell. Mount a weatherproof Flic outside and have it announce "Someone's at the door" on every Echo.
• Kids' storytime button. Press once to start a sleep-sounds Routine and speak a bedtime message.
• Office "do not disturb" button. Toggles a variable via var-DND=on, which an Alexa Routine or Flow can then read.
• Car dash Flic. A long press on arrival home announces "I'm home" on the indoor Echoes.