Home Assistant / Alexa Integration - NO SUBSCRIPTION 

IMPORTANT NOTE! Your Alexa devices must be on the same network as Home Assistant for Emulated Hue devices to be discovered.

I appreciate you taking the time to edit the audio so that my Alexa device does not wake up. Great attention to detail and I know it takes extra time

"Alex-A" so obvious. Genius! . . . from new fan. (Longtime LIFX user)

Wow. So simple, yet I don’t recall seeing this anywhere else, especially not on HA specific channels! I already have setup my Alexa skill and it has been working fine for the last 3 years, so I don’t need this now, I wish I knew this earlier! Got to your channel for the shed video (excellent BTW), didn’t expect also to get HA tips! Great work!

With just a couple of hours of headache I finally got it working, thanks for the help

Thank you very much sharing! It also works with my blinds - Alexa sees them as dimmable lights :) Greetings from Austria

🤣 ‘alex-a’ 🤣

This is great! Such an easy way to do it instead of dealing with AWS servicea Thanks!

I gave you a like for going out of your way and editing Alex A or muting it when you spoke. I gave you a sub for great content. I'm excited to check out your channel!

Hello, thanks for this. My question is the following : can this process expose alexa echo's to home assistant as a media player to use on automations for exemple ?

May be worth adding a note about installing Studio Code server. Does not come bundled with home server, and for a while i was very confused when you said "im gonna go into studio code server", and trying to follow along as a new user i dont have this. Some users will need a guide for SCS, i downloaded to docker and the setup page looked very confusing, so i'll be watching a video tutorial about that shortly. But may be worth adding a note along the lines of "before anything, install SCS" ect. Will hopefully come back to your guide once i have SCS setup

It works! so easy! Thanx a lot!

Hi Brilliant description. I have been using this for a while now, with no issues. However I added 3 entities, Fan High Fan Medium and Fan Low. These 3 entities are not being broadcast by HA and as such are not detected by Alexa. I have looked for the config/.storage/emulated_hue.ids file with Terminal and it does not exist. Any help would be gratefully received.

Works great. But NEVER use expose_by_default: TRUE (thought that would be a great idea) if you have a fully working HA with tons of non-zigbee devices, router, NAS... Alexa will find every single device again plus all of their entities and add them all as active but not reachable. Your smart life (etc.) device entries will not be affected, but it' a pain in the a.. to delete the useless Hue crap. Greetings from Germany. Great work.

@HandyDadTV what about the Alexa Smart Home Skill? My Alexa says it requires Smart Home skill to be enabled. In order to enable it an AWS account is needed which is free for the first 12 month only. Do I need Smart Home skill enabled or there is another way to do it?

Does only works on lights or any of the Home assistant devices ?

Hi Chris. I followed your video and the devices? appear in the Alexa app but in most cases the 'server is unresponsive'. They work in Home Assistant. Did you get this at some stage? The only devices that work have been found by Magic Home. I didn't think was needed. The names in Home Assistant match the names in the Alexa app exactly. Any thoughts please??

can you do the opposite? Can you import devices added through alexa into home assistant?

Thanks for the video! I successfully installed it but it works only with non philips hue lights. I configured my philips hue light in HA with ZA, they work well but they don't work with emulated hue. Sometimes they work for on/off commands only, some times they are unreacheble. Do you know how to fix this?

it worked fine for me thanks you but it doesn't works for devices like cameras and thermostats its only limited to lights and boolean switches i'd like to see a future video of how we can make it works with aws and a skill thanks

This is totally the best! I am new to HA and have setup 2 boxes and installs to learn with. I have also done this the hard way which was a nightmare and not free as you have to buy a domain for all the account setups! This way is just a million times easyier and works just the same, thank you for a great video.

oh brother, this is sweet!!!! Thank you so much for taking the time to put this tutorial together. I, obviously, followed your steps and have integrated Alexa with my home assistant devices.

Thanks for creating this guide. I am currently researching Home Assistant to see if it would work for an upgrade in my family’s smart home. The cloud was my first roadblock however this work around should be able to fix that issue for me.

You are a genius 😲

Been using this years ago until Alex A was added into Hacs + nodered I stop using it.

Great vid, this exposes HA entities in Alexa. How about the opoposite of that? Is there a solution for that? I want plugs that are in Alexa to be exposed to HA to be controlled in HA automation. Is that possible without HACloud? Case in point, i have a bunch of these Linkind doggone plugs that cannot be integrated with Tuya/SmartLife, but instead only work with an app called AIDOT, and work perfectly in Alexa. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thank you so much, I made plenty of mistakes along the way, but it's working perfectly now. Just got to work out how to do inputs if that's possible.

Thought this was gonna be really helpful. Lost you @ 2:39. First we are going to go into Settings (ok) and look under 'Integration' -??? - Where is 'Integrations, your mouse/keyboard action way way too fast. Oh well. Shame, have to exit there as I'm lost. Respect for the Alex-a though, very nice touch, all should learn from you with that. UPDATE: Run this through 2:39 a dozen times and find NO 'Integration' menu/option, are absolutely sure you voice is in sync with vid, I am totally lost here.

Thanks for the video. On/Off works great (for switch entities) but for light entities Brightness always goes to 100%, as soon as I turn on the device. I can reduce it but Alexa doesn't remember the position, after I turn the device off and always goes to full brightness as soon as I turn it on. For media_player entities volume on TV goes to 100% as well, which is very annoying! Is there a solution on this?

Thanks for this one.

Great video, thanks ! Do you know if is it possible to add also entities that won't be seen as light bulbs? Let's say I want to increase the volume of my tv (it is an entity in HA) or anything else that is not on/off. For example, thanks to you I am able now to see my TV in Alexa but I see it as a Light Bulb and therefore I can only switch it off.

Interestingly, when I tried this it added all of my HA smart devices to the Alexa app even though I didn't have them defined in the configuration.yml. I had to delete a bunch I didn't want. Otherwise its working well, thanks for the video!

Im struggling and may havr missed something hwre, but rhe screen on thr right ad 8:42, what is that, are they just devices on your home network that are not alexa ebabled? My ultimate goal is to run youtube music from alexa echo devices over wifi rather than directly link them via bluetooth

Very nice Video! Is there a way the get the devices from Alexa to HomeAssistant? So the other way around ? (e.g. the Alexa SmartPlug)

Kicking $6 a month to the HA devs is something everyone should do if you can; at least buy them a cup of coffee once a year. Supporting those that do great work keeps HA on the cutting edge.

Hello, thanks for your video. it helped me a lot! Does this work with sensors?

emulated hue was wayyy to complicated for me with all the yaml, restart home assistant to add new stuff... annoying. I use node-red-contrib-amazon-echo in Node-Red for that. Just add a node in node red with a nice name and trigger whatever I want from it. It can even dim or set light colors. But make sure your port 80 is free tho (disable emulated hue for that to run)

I get configuration.yaml parsing errors due to indentation problems. I noticed you have a certificate installed. Is that part of the process? Is there a video on loading your own certificate?

Nice workaround but you can't control the alexa device from hassio this way.

Do you think you could set this up like the !secrets command so that it pulls all of this from a seperate yaml file and keep your configuration.yaml file nice and clean?

Should the home assistant be exposed to the internet for this to work? Can it work locally when you are connected to the same network with HA but without being exposed to the internet?

Question: I have the devices already named and connected to Alexa. I use Vera Plus to install it. Do I use the same device name I already created in Alexa or do I have to reinstall the device?

That's pretty damn clunky tbh, what about switches or plugs that dont control lights? they all show as lights in alexa?

Hi. This is brilliant !!. Is it possible to have actionable notifications, i.e. Booleon sent from HA to AlexA, Alexa responds "do you want the eating on?" and waits for a response Yes or No, this could set a boolean for HA to operate heating.

I'm glad I found your channel through Reddit. The algorithm is slacking. You have a ton of stuff relevant to my interests. And I appreciate your honesty and easy to understand explanations. Easy subscription!

Wow excelent tip ! Could you help me for add amazon plug into home assistant ?

Invalid domain light while restart HA, how to solve?

you say it took 5 yet the video is 10 i am skeptical already, will keep watching

How did you decide the naming that home assistant would recognize?

Incredibly simple, THANK YOU FOR SHARING!

wonderful explanation and pretty straight forward. it just worked in first instant.

can you call a script instead of a device as the entity?

It was amazing. thank you very much

you’re the best.. thank you 🙏🙏🙏

is it possible to call a script created HA through Alexa

this is brilliant if i can get it working. the part i'm not clear on is the entities. Where did you get light.island_dimmer: ? I suspect that matches somewhere with your lights but I don't have any alexa in home assistant so i'm confused.

THANKS FOR THIS !! So simple I cannot believe it ! :P

Using this to turn on my tv, When I do the volume goes to 100% 😭😭 guess cause it’s a “light “

Thanks for the easy to follow tutorial. This worked to enable voice control of my Tasmota flashed Sonoff plugs to with Alexa via Home Assistant.

Works perfect! Thanks 😊

Does this also work for Shutters and ACs?

Can this method be used to control automation in home assistant

Will this method also allow Alexa to run scenes/automations made in HA?

Is there any text in yaml where Alexa can discover all devices?

For me it did not work, alexa won't find anything. i've pretty mich copied your configuration, only adding my own entities (just two for now). won't work sadly :(

I have an Alex-B, what do I do?

Ok, so I do have a home assistant supervised installation. I am a very detailed systems guy. Every time that I get into doing anything with Home Assistant, I burn a day or two and end up giving up. Simple things like actually finding studio code server after you install it are darn near impossible. I finally got HACS installed after months of trial and mostly err. The problem with HA is if you used HA from the beginning its not bad. I swear by my Hubitat and I have incredibly complex automations on it. I have wanted to just write an automation to get home assistant to speak a response on Alexa. After months, I just gave up. Echo Speaks on Hubitat was a total of 10 minutes and it works solidly. Anyway, I have come to a dead end after installing Studio Code Server and never being able to find it again.

Its pronounced Homie assistan T

I couldn't get this to work when following your video but then I realised I'd made the same indentation error at emulated_hue. Fixed that and it worked straight away! Thanks a lot for sharing.

Hi, I'm getting bad indentation when I add the Name or Hidden status. Any idea why?

I followed your video and your advice on creating toggle helper to expose to Alexa via Emulated Hue few weeks ago. It worked flawlessly. I recently added a Zooz Zwave light to home assistant and followed the exact same steps, but this time just a light entity. I even then tried just doing another input Boolean like I did the first time. However, Alexa won’t discover the new “devices”. You ran into this issue at all?

Does this still work correctly? Im not able to find any new devices.

Alex-A? Am I missing something .....

Even better, make sure all your devices are Matter certified or bridged. Then just pair to Alexa, google, Apple, and Home assistant. No Subscriptions, No cloud, All Local, all Fun. Sure voice is still processed in the cloud. Everything else is local.

For those struggling with this I had to manually discover devices via the app rather than asking the Alexa device to discover devices as below: 1. In the Alexa app go to add a device 2. Scroll all the way down and select "Other" 3. Select "Can't find a matching logo" 4. Select "Not Sure?" Alexa will look for devices and hopefully find them. For some reason even though they were then discovered and controllable via the Alexa app, the Alexa device still wouldn't recognise them via voice. I had to create routines to force this as below: 1. In the Alexa app go to Routines, add routine 2. Enter routine name e.g. Switch on 3. In "When this happen" choose "Voice" then enter the phrase including the device name e.g. Switch on 4. In "Add action" choose "Smart Home" then "Lights" and select your device and press "Next" 5. Choose "Power On" and click "Next" 6. Save the routine and create another routine to turn the device off It's a pain having to go through these manual steps but it's the only thing I could do to get it working in my setup as mid-November 2023.

Thank you for this video! "Node-RED Alexa Home Skill Bridge" and "Node-RED Smart Home Control" seem even more powerful, has anyone tried and can compare?

I am actually using a Philips Hue Bridge and some Hue Light bulbs and got all that integrated into the alexa (app) before. Working fine. Now getting another (emulated) hue bridge running seems alexa to get confused. It simply doesn't find my entities from the new emulated hue bridge. Any hints on what I can do/change?

Does this also sync groups set up in HA via Helpers?

Wow, very neat!! I have a query though. Emulated Hue is basically for Philips Hue lights, so it will support all lighting devices. However, will Alexa discover devices like thermostats, curtain controllers, media players etc through this Emulated hue?

Hello, I've been looking for something like this for a long time, thank you very much. Is the entity "switch.kitchen_scene_controller:" fictitious or is the name taken from Alexa? Unfortunately, no new device is found in the app for me.

I tried this since Amazon send me an email saying my 1-year of free AWS was going to end (I thought it could be used free forever with a light use as it can be the skill for my Home Assistant. What you explain works flawlessly, at least if you only sync lights. I tried with sensors, courtains & AC and nor of these work well, because they are treated as lights and it can't be changed

This is amazing, I have a question though. I have am alexa supported music streamer connected to my AVR, but unfortunately it can not wake up my AVR. Is there any way to add an action to the built-in "play music" routine in alexa? Or I must have a custom one that will both play music and start my AVR? Just got my alexa stuff, so new to this...

Do you need a physical hue bridge? The documentation for Emulated Hue says it's required, but you never brought it up in your video as far as I saw. Right now I have everything setup perfectly, but alexa on my tablet does not discover new devices 😢

Thanx, this is great... i just tried it and at first HA gave me a notification that host IP cannot be set, so i deleted the host IP line and it worked perfect!

What a discovery.Fantastic!! Just one thing. Is this a local solution or is Alexa still needing to use its Amazon cloud?

We are playing alexa now 😊

This is brilliant, but I just want to check something out, do you have to have the lights connected to the HA first (via Zigbee) or are you using these as phantom switches for alexa to control, but there are no actual lights?

Great video. I believe all data is still going through an Amazon server somewhere. I’m going for local control only these days

Your videos are amazing. I was dreading trying to tackle all of this until I saw your Home Assistant videos. THANK YOU!

beautifull idea and explanation and it looks like that it can not really be closed soon. 9:56 have you recogniced the message: WAITING FOR ROYAL PHILIPS ELECTRONICS the dutch royals seem to be back in business and have entered your home - funny to watch cause I could not believe and have never heard about Philips as a royal company.

Hi, can this allow amazon lady to control items (both hue and non-hue stuff) added into HA via zigbee2mqtt via a sonoff dongle? with/without a hue bridge?

HI, how I can expose a script ? Where I can find a code example to how emulated hue let me expose a HA script on Alexa . Thanks in advance who can help me.

LOL - Did the coding and OBTW you can't restart HA IF your coding is wrong...LIKE mine was..:{

Just letting you know I followed your instructions last night when I got home and everything worked perfectly. Thank you!!

Thank you VERY MUCH. You are my hero. Now I can secure my smart home by locking in my devices. Thank you thank you thank you. =)

I think I'm in trouble -- Alex-A found 98 new devices...

Wow this works. I can setup routine from alexa to run my home assistant devices. Thanks

Thank you!

YOOOO...this worked perfectly. I watched this video initially and saved it to watch again if i didn't find any other solution by literally took me 10mins to mess around and set it up (as a person that has never edited my yaml files) and it works flawlessly. Needed this cause while I am going to be setting up zigbee switches around the house now that I have everything hooked up to Home Assistant, I didn't want my alexa dots to be rendered useless. Thanks again for taking the time to make this video.

Grande!!!!!! Thank you so much!!!! Now I just need a tutorial to use the updated ESPHOME and I'll be on the runway...You have a new subscriber!!