Connect Home Assistant to Alexa

Home Assistant (HA) is a piece of free home automation software for controlling your Smart Home.

People use it as the central hub or command centre for their smart home tech.

With HA you can link all your devices in just one place and build cool automations based on the state of all your devices.

Alexa + Home Assistant

Whilst it has support for some Alexa functionality, Voice Monkey provides an alternative for triggering Alexa routines directly from Home Assistant and making Text To Speech (TTS) announcements.

What Is Voice Monkey?

Voice Monkey extends Alexa’s smart home capabilities.

It offers an API to trigger Alexa Routines remotely from services such as Home Assistant and IFTTT.

It also allows you to make dynamic text to speech announcements via the API. Want to announce to one or multiple Alexa devices that a camera detected motion? You can do that with Voice Monkey 🙂

How To Trigger Alexa Routines from Home Assistant

The process is easy.

Firstly, sign up to Voice Monkey and follow the instructions to create your first virtual Trigger device and Routine.

A Voice Monkey Trigger device is simply a virtual doorbell device which can be pressed (or triggered). We can use these virtual devices, as triggers in our Alexa Routines.

But how do we trigger these virtual doorbells from Home Assistant?

Trigger Your Voice Monkey device With The RESTful Command

In Home Assistant you can make API calls using the REST command.

Simply add the following to Home Assistant’s configuration.yaml file:

# Voice Monkey Alexa Routine API call

rest_command:
trigger_voice_monkey:
    url: https://api-v2.voicemonkey.io/trigger
    method: POST
    verify_ssl: true
    content_type:  'application/json; charset=utf-8'
    payload: '{"token":"API_TOKEN","device":"{{deviceId}}"}'

# End of Voice Monkey Alexa Routine API call

In the code above you should replace API_TOKEN with your own API token found in the Voice Monkey console (make sure you keep it secret!).

Even better, keep your tokens in the a secrets.yaml file to ensure they don’t accidently get leaked by way of a public Github post etc.

Testing

Go to developer tools and test it out.

First, restart the server (Configuration ->Server Controls -> RESTART) to apply the new changes:

1. Go to Home Assistant’s Developer Tools ->Services screen
2. Select “rest_command.trigger_voice_monkey” from the Service menu
3. Enter the following in the Service Data field to trigger your Voice Monkey trigger device:
   {"deviceId":"MONKEY_ID"}
4. Select the CALL SERVICE button

You must replace MONKEY_ID with the ID of your Voice Monkey trigger device found in the Devices manager section of the console.

And that’s it!

You can now start triggering Alexa Routines from Home Assistant.

Making announcements

To make announcements using Alexa, you must first create a Speaker device in Voice Monkey.

Go to the Devices section of the console. Create a new Speaker device and follow the instructions for creating the Alexa routine and linking your Echo device.

In your HASS set-up you simply add the ‘announcement’ parameter to your payload object. Here is the same code above but with the ‘announcement’ key + value.

# Voice Monkey Alexa Announcement API call

rest_command:
trigger_voice_monkey:
    url: https://api-v2.voicemonkey.io/announcement 
    method: POST
    verify_ssl: true
    content_type:  'application/json; charset=utf-8'
    payload: '{"token":"API_TOKEN","device":"{{deviceId}}","announcement":"{{announcement}}"}'

# End of Voice Monkey Alexa Announcement API call

Now when your testing, you must also send an ‘announcement’ parameter along with the Voice Monkey device ID in the Service Data field e.g.
{"deviceId":"MONKEY_ID","announcement":"YOUR TEXT HERE"}

If you go to the API Playground you can take a look at some of the other parameters available in our API. You can then easily integrate those into your Yaml file.

I hope that helps get you started creating some awesome automations with HA and Alexa.
Let us know your automation ideas in the comments below!