alexa devices automated announcements

[worthy badge]

@sudden heart Integration seems to be working well and I really appreciate the ability to pick up the temperature from my echo unit.
I use an automation to announce that my dishwasher has finished. The message is announced twice and both the Announce and Speak Notifiers were triggered. Whilst this has twice the opportunity to encourage my kids to empty the dishwasher, I would prefer it to announce once. Is there anyway to achieve this? It is not the fault of the automation because it only announced once using the Alexa Media Player HACS integration.

[sudden heart]

Double check the automation

You probably used a device instead of an entity

[worthy badge]

Absolutely right - thanks

[versed root]

I'd like to add to this as well for future users searching for an issue.

If your Alexa device announces twice or speaks twice, disable the "Speak" Entity. This will stop the repeated announcement.

[sudden heart]

@versed root this is a wrong advice 😉

The solution, as per documentation, is to use an entity and not the device as target

[versed root]

It's not necessarily wrong advice, just a different method of accomplishing the same goal.

I looked into it some more and found another way of doing it.

My initial process:

• Disable the "Speak" Entity for all Alexa Devices
• Add them all into an "Alexa Speaker" label
• Add the label into all automations of this type

The new method I realized I could just do

• Copy and paste in all Entity IDs through YAML Editor for all automations

What are the disadvantages of disabling the Speak Entity?
What are its uses? Without the initial announcement ping, Alexa just seemingly randomly speaks and the initial words could be missed.

[sudden heart]

The fact that you are not using Speak is not a reason to tell people disable it

The corerct way of doing the automation, which is also future proof, is to target the announce or the speak entities not the device

This way you have nothing to do manually, and everything works as designed

Anyway you can do whatever you prefer on your installation, just please don't suggest convoluted solutions to others

[versed root]

The last part of your sentence is condescending instead of being helpful and guiding. Interacting with you and people like you deters me from continuing to interact with this community, and I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one.