Alexa Media Player Transport Adaptor¶

Announce a message on an Alexa Echo device using the alexa_media_player integration available via HACS.

The message_usage option can be set to combine_title or use_title to override the default behaviour of speaking the standard.

Voice specific message¶

Use spoken_message in the data section of a notification call to provide a different message for a voice notification than used for other transports like email or mobile push.

Volume management¶

By default, every announcement assumes background music might be playing on the target device(s) and does the following, all via the Alexa cloud API (notify.alexa_media, media_player.volume_set, media_player.media_pause/media_stop/media_play):

1. Snapshot current volume of every target (falls back to volume_fallback if the integration reports None, see AMP issue #1394).
2. Pause music if playing (or media_stop if pause_music: false, to suppress the confirmation beep).
3. Set volume to the requested volume, if any.
4. Announce the message.
5. Wait for an estimate of the TTS duration (SSML-aware; tune with tts_char_speed).
6. Resume music playback, if it was paused.
7. Restore volume to its prior level.

All of data keys below are optional:

Reducing cloud API calls and Notification delay¶

Each of steps 2, 3, 6 and 7 above is a separate Alexa cloud API call per target device, and step 5's wait only exists to sequence step 6/7 after the announcement. For a pure alert/status announcement where nothing is actually playing music, none of that is needed — it just adds cloud round-trip latency (and can be a real contributor to announcements sounding "late" when there are several target devices, since these calls run per-device).

If this is unnecessary, for example if at least some of the devices are used mainly for announcement purposes and rarely play music, then this can be switched off at the delivery or transport level:

deliveries:
  alexa_all:
    transport: alexa_media_player
    options:
      media_auto_pause: false

If this only applies to some Alexa devices, then make two Delivery definitions, one for the music players without the media_auto_pause override and one with.

TTS duration calibration¶

tts_char_speed (seconds per character) defaults to 0.06 (Italian/English). Suggested values by language family:

References¶

Home Assistant Core¶

• Alexa Media Player Integration

Other¶

• alexapy