Hi all, sorry for any dumb questions but I am an absolute newbie for home assistant. I tried adding Alexa integrations and media player and it didn’t work. I understand from Amazon community that there is an issue. I also now can’t see devices on my Alexa app which I understand is likely related.
The only resolution is to disconnect Alexa from HA and wait 7 days.
Ultimately, I have decided to stay on Alexa for the time being so I deleted the skills in the Alexa app and deleted the server. Does this automatically disconnect from Alexa within home assistant?
#Removing Alexa from home assistant
lilac creek
lilac creek
No one able to help on this?
quartz hamlet
What skills were deleted from the alexa app?
What HA integrations were in use? Alexa Devices? Alexa Media Player?
lilac creek
What skills were deleted from the alexa app?
What HA integrations were in use? ...
I’m afraid I’m not sure. It was Home Assistant skill within the Alexa app and then yes Alexa is a media player in Home Assistant itself.
patent vine
You need to understand what you have done.
Alexa uses Skills to initiate connections to services and in the case of the Home Assistant skill will either be connecting to Nabu Casa Cloud (if you pay for a subscription) or directly to your Home Assistant Server (you would have set-up your router to allow these inbound connections). Understand that the Alexa skill uses entities exposed by your Home Assistant server. The Alexa Skill's API's have been made public and are documented making it easy for developers to integrate (note, that this means changes by Amazon will normally be backward compatible).
The Alexa integrations (both Alexa Devices and Alexa Media Player) allow Home Assistant to connect to the various Amazon Alexa Devices you have connected to your Network. These integrations expose the sensors built-in to these devices as entities as well as exposing the devices as media_player's. Understand that the integrations create entities on you Home Assistant Server. The Amazon API's for this are closed and hence changes made by Amazon are not necessarily backward compatible. It means that the integration developers are constantly trying to keep up with Amazon's changes.
The issue many have had is that Amazon have implemented rate limiting and the Integration developers do not know the limits. Both the Alexa Devices and Alexa Media Player have been hit by these rate limits and once an account hits the rate limit even the Official Amazon Alexa App is affected. To get things back to normal the account needs to be unlocked and this happens after a period of time (Amazon have not disclosed this period but have told people to wat 7 days).
The simplest way, is to disable the Amazon Devices and/or Alexa Media Player integrations:
Go to Settings -> devices & services
Click on the Integration
Click the 3 dots next to each instance of the Integration entries and select 'Disable'
Leave these disabled until you can see devices in the official Amazon Alexa App, but note that re-enabling them may trigger the rate limit again.
lilac creek
The simplest way, is to disable the Amazon Devices and/or Alexa Media Player int...
Thank you for this detailed reply. It is helpful. My issue is that I have deleted the HA server. Does this mean that that the integration will be deleted automatically. AAs such, I can/t get into the devices and services to actually disable. I know in hindsight, this was a poor move on my part
patent vine
What do you mean by you 'deleted the HA Server'. If you have removed the HA Server you will need to re-install it as you do not currently have HA on your network.
lilac creek
When I couldn’t get it work, I decided to go back to just using Alexa. So as I had surmised that HA was causing the issue, I reset the HA green and sold it. I deleted the server as part of the reset but I don’t delete all the devices/integrations from within before deleting the server. I just assumed that resetting and deleting it would do that for me.
patent vine
OK, so you got rid of Home Assistant.
You should remove the Home Assistant Skill from the Amazon Alexa app. You may also need to remove all the Devices this skill created.
lilac creek
I’ve removed the skill form the Alexa app. My issue is that the devices don’t load in the Alexa app (which I understand was caused by HA). This is the alleged 7 day cooldown. Ut I don’t know if the devices are a) still in Alexa or not, and b) if they are, are they still communicating thus resetting my 7 day period each time?
patent vine
You will need to wait till you can see the devices in the Alexa App. Since you have removed the HA Green, you should not have any integrations trying to access the Amazon API's and hence the Account 'lockout' will get reset at some point. Unfortunately we do not know how long this 'lockout' will last - although I would leave things alone for 7 days and then check the app on the mobile.
lilac creek
Thank you. Appreciate your time and suggestions. Will see how it goes over the next week.