Echo & Alexa Forums
General Category => Amazon Echo Discussion => Topic started by: someyankinrio on June 27, 2015, 06:13:35 pm
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It should be that simple but it's not. Any suggestions?
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If you have a remote, you can spring the surprise from another room. Create the 'birthday' playlist and as the cake is coming out, duck behind something and speak the command.
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Using the same trick with the remote, you can say
"Simon says: Happy Birthday _______" and Alexa will repeat "Happy Birthday ______" to give a personalized birthday greeting before you start the playlist
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Out of the box, the Echo doesn't have the ability to "remember" things from one session to the next, it has no on-board memory chip or disk. Developers who are trying to accomplish the sort of thing you're talking about, having the Echo make something happen some period of time after the original request, are generally working with cloud-based web services to make it happen.
The tricky part is that the requests of each user have to be tracked separately, which gets into maintaining separate user records online...it's a level of complexity far beyond what might seem required at first glance. :P
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LoveMyEcho - I think you hit the nail on the head. I wonder if there's a way to "set a custom alarm" that might accomplish this. General timed tasks would be seriously useful
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Open an audio app like Audacity and create a new file.
Tracks -> Add New -> Audio Track
Generate -> Generate Silence (yes, it easily makes 20 minutes of silence) (or record 20 minutes of silence)
After this track, on the timeline, add in your Birthday greetings (cheers!) then drag and drop in your playlist. Celebrate Good Times come on!
Upload to Amazon as one of your songs.
Give it a secret name like 'echotalk surprise #1.'
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Cool! What a great idea. Thanks. :D
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This may now be possible using IFTTT, because Alexa alarm and timer triggers are now supported. However, you have to tie the Echo's alarm or timer going off to making music play in some other app or web service. So you could have the alarm trigger music to start playing in last.fm, Google Drive or Soundcloud, for example, and it would pipe to the Echo's speaker if Bluetooth is enabled on the device where the music is playing (assuming the device is within Bluetooth range). Having the "Happy Birthday" in between the two things is more questionable.
I think Y's solution is much more elegant.
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Just curious if anyone knows if you can trigger echo to announce "someones in the driveway" based on a trigger from my home automation motion detection? I could do this with SONOS, but would rather use Alexa for this purpose.
Thoughts?