Home Assistant with Alexa: Control your smart home by voice!

If you have Amazon Alexa voice assistants at home and connected smart devices, you’ll be able to control them by voice in seconds thanks to Home Assistant’s integration with Alexa, and today we’re going to find out all the details.

Advantages and disadvantages of Home Assistant with Alexa

Tutorial on using Home Assistant with Alexa

To begin with, you must have all the devices you want to control by voice previously linked to Home Assistant.

In my example, I have a door and window sensor, a light bulb, a socket, a temperature and humidity sensor, a thermostatic valve and a motion sensor.

All of these devices use Zigbee technology and are linked to the Zigbee2MQTT platform with my Home Assistant Green hub and Zigbee ZBT-2 Zigbee antenna.

Of course, you can mix other technologies and devices.

In order to be able to easily control our devices by voice, I recommend giving simple names to each smart device.

The easiest way to connect Home Assistant to Amazon Alexa voice assistants is to subscribe to the Home Assistant Cloud service.

It costs 7.5 euros per month or 75 euros per year, but it is worth noting that you have the possibility to try 1 month for free.

Home Assistant Cloud offers a number of advantages. In addition to being able to connect our Home Assistant installation with the voice assistants Amazon Alexa and Google Home, thanks to this service, we can also control our home by voice with the Home Assistant Voice voice assistant, Nabu Casa’s own material.

It is an interesting alternative for the privacy of our data, as it is a voice assistant that follows the philosophy of Home Assistant by not storing or processing data.

But that’s not all, another advantage of this service is having secure remote access from anywhere in the world to your home from your phone.

We also have backup and restore services to save and recover configurations if you have any failure in your installation.

And by subscribing to this service, it also allows Nabu Casa to finance the activities of the Open Home Foundation, of which Home Assistant and ESPHome are part.

To subscribe to Home Assistant Cloud, from the Home Assistant interface, go to “Settings”.

And “Home Assistant Cloud”.

We can start the 1 month free trial and for this, we must create an account without payment information, being practical to test this service without commitment.

Once the account has been created, we must confirm it from our email inbox and now, we will be able to log in with this created account.

Now, if we go to “Settings”.

And “Voice Assistants”.

We can activate Alexa Assistant to be able to control our devices linked to Home Assistant with Amazon Alexa voice assistants.

If we look at the bottom, we have 0 exposed entities that correspond to the different device functions that we will be able to control by voice.

So let’s hit “Expose entities”.

Now, all the functions of each device that we have in Home Assistant will appear, so we will be able to mark the ones we want to be able to control by voice and to confirm, we click on “Expose entities”.

As we can see in my example, my 6 devices have the Amazon Alexa icon and if we click on it, we can at any time choose to activate or deactivate voice control with “Assist”, “Amazon Alexa” and “Google Home”.

But 1 icon has the exclamation point and if you look at it, it indicates that this device cannot be voice controlled and corresponds to my motion sensor.

So not 100% of devices can be voice-controlled with Alexa, although many of them can be.

Now, we go to the Amazon Alexa app and go to “Settings”.

Let’s go to “Skills and games”.

And search for “Home Assistant”.

Activate the Home Assistant skill.

And we must fill in the details of our Home Assistant Cloud account.

Amazon Alexa will search for the devices we have previously exposed and, after a few seconds, they should appear in the Amazon Alexa interface.

So now, we will have control of our smart devices from the Amazon Alexa app.

But, of course, the whole interest is also to be able to control them by voice.

• “Alexa, turn on the light bulb.”
• “Alexa, turn the light bulb to blue.”
• “Alexa, turn the bulb to yellow.”
• “Alexa, set the bulb to 10% of its intensity.”

• “Alexa, turn on the plug.”
• “Alexa, turn off the plug.”

• “Alexa, what is the temperature measured by the air quality sensor.”
• Answer: “The temperature measured by the air quality sensor is 22.2°C”.

• “Alexa, is the door sensor open?”.
• Answer: “Door sensor is open”.

• “Alexa, set the valve to 5°C.”
• “Alexa, set the valve to 30°C.”

As you have seen, we can both know information from sensors and control devices by voice with different possible actions, so it can be very interesting for a smart home project, to have control of your home, both from your phone and with voice assistants.