@Ruud_van_der_Teems you should post your comments about problems with Alexa Echo on the French ISP Free here, as this is a long running thread on that topic. I am not the app developer or affiliated to Athom, just another user trying to help point you in the right direction. Sorry I can’t be of more assistance.
@staeff, @SergeP, @thierry_arguimbau,
I change my internet service provider for Orange (Sosh) since 3 days : all flow and connections are working perfectly with automatic connection and manuel connection on amazon.alexa.fr 
I don’t really understood what can be the root cause but Free is really the problem.
Thanks for all the energy and actions you deployed on this topic
Hi, I’m unable to authenticate my Amazon account with the Amazon Echo app.Two-step verification is enabled and an authenticator app is configured. I have no Amazon passkey configured. My Amazon email and password are correct.However, every login attempt gives me the error: “Amazon did not show the step to enter the authenticator code.”I already reset and restarted the Homey app and tried both Automatic and amazon.com as the Amazon server.What can I do to complete the authentication?
Can you try to do a fresh login to amazon.com (or amazon.de in your case) from a browser on the same network and then try again? That usually resolves it.
@staeff First of all, Thank you, thank you, thank you for this app. I am highly dependent on using echo devices as feedback and information speakers throughout the home.
Second, a possible “bug” report: When I use the “say message” card with the “swedish astrid” voice, I get english pronounciation and English voice. Could there be that the card is calling the wrong voice in the background?
Some context: The same seems true for Danish but perhaps not for German which seems to work fine.
Thanks! This isn’t the card picking the wrong voice. Amazon only lets Echo devices use some of its Polly voices, and Swedish isn’t one of them, since Alexa doesn’t support Swedish at all from what I can gather. When a voice isn’t available, Alexa ignores it and reads the text in your account’s default voice, which is why you hear English. I’ll take the unsupported voices out of the list in the next update.
@staeff Thank you for the quick reply. It did work with the other Amazon app on homey so I do believe that they are supported. (To be fair, I did not try the other app with Danish, but Swedish works.)
It seems to be available as “standard voice” if it helps. Available voices - Amazon Polly And there seems to be a voice called Elin that is avaiable as “neural” voice.
(I could of course be wrong and the Polly documentation has no bearing on Echo, but I was able to get Swedish with the other now defunct app.)
Thanks, that was really helpful, and you’re right. I checked the old app’s code and it builds exactly the same voice instructions as mine: “speak this in Astrid’s voice, in Swedish”. The difference is how it delivers them to the Echo. Alexa has two ways to say something:
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Speak: the Echo just says the text, as if it were answering you. My app uses this, and it seems to quietly ignore voices outside your account’s language, so you get the default English voice.
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Announce: Alexa’s announcement feature. It usually plays a short tone first, it’s blocked while Do Not Disturb is on, and it shows the text on Echo Show screens. The old app sent voice messages this way, and announcements seem to respect the voice.
(The Polly page you found lists what Amazon’s text-to-speech service offers in general. Alexa only uses part of that on Echo devices, and Amazon’s own list for Alexa leaves Astrid out, even though it evidently worked for you. So the docs weren’t much help here.)
I’ll test this on my own Echo before committing to anything, and let you know how it goes.
@Pantera_Ruber With “Say with Voice”, Alexa only uses the voices Amazon lists as supported (English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese). Any other voice, such as Swedish Astrid or Danish Mads, is quietly replaced by your normal Alexa voice.
Sent as an announcement, those voices do work. The catch is that announcements are silent while Do Not Disturb is on.
My proposal would be to split it into two separate cards, so existing flows keep working and there is no confusion what voices are supported with which method:
- Say with Voice: only the supported voices, and still speaks during Do Not Disturb.
- Announce with Voice (new): all voices, silent during Do Not Disturb.
What do you think?
You already have two separate Then cards, the top offers a dropdown list of all 3 speech types: whisper, say, announce. But the bottom one with the Voice parameter only offers: whisper & say. Could you not add Announce to the list of the bottom card, and it not break existing flows?
(Forgive me if this is a stupid question, I don’t know how the internals of the app or the Amazon API work)
Not a stupid question. Adding Announce there wouldn’t break anything. The catch is that not every voice works with every type: voices like Astrid only work as announcements. So one card would need a different voice list for Say and for Announce. But Homey can’t clear the voice you’ve already picked when you change the dropdown, so you could still end up with “Say + Astrid”. That would then either fall back to your normal Alexa voice, or secretly become an announcement and go silent during Do Not Disturb.
With two cards, each only offers voices that actually work with it. But if most people prefer one card, I can do that too.
Two schools of thought, either populate the little Help/Info doodah with something along the lines of “not all voices work for all speech types, and when a voice isn’t valid it will fall back to your account’s default”… or have a dedicated Announce with voice card, and a separate Say/Whisper with voice card.
Either way is valid… but I guess the latter is more idiot proof… so may save answering a whole bunch of questions. To be honest I handle the DND settings in Flows… my Echo Flows are possibly way over engineered ha ha ha 
I think that all the suggestions are very constructive. Am I understanding correctly that the “Announce” that we are talking about is different than the “Announce” that announces a message using all the devices simultaneously?
Good question…which one is this ?
The announcements are key-points in my home system i use them for many different devices / flows on 4 Alexas in every floor…but i set always for every device the command like this simple flow for example, is there a way to built this announce with one flow card for all devices? I used in a other flow this card, therefore i create a own speaker-group in alexa, with this command i dont must use for every device a command, maybe this works with an announcements as well?
@Drako74 Two cards is where I’m heading. It’s harder to get wrong.
@Pantera_Ruber It’s the same announcement feature that routines use, but sent only to the Echo you pick on the card. There’s no “all devices” option in the API.
@Rammstein Speaker groups only accept music and volume, not speech, which is why the group has no speech cards. If you use the same set of Echos often, make one flow with a “Say” card per Echo that takes the message as an argument, and start that flow from your other flows.
Perhaps not in the Amazon API, but could you create an Announce All card, that just fires the same request to all the Echo devices you have paired with the app?
Feel free to tell me to shut up if I’m just making work for you, but it would be a nice feature (you should see the spaghetti that is my Advanced Flow to achieve this )
nice idee..i will try this, sounds this works, great thx!
Pics please
I do have some ideas to split it up a bit better in to smaller chunks, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet… it would mostly consist of switching out the native Flow started cards for the Advanced Triggers app cards, so one call could trigger separate rooms simultaneously. But I would also replace the initial trigger card, which involves going through my 214 Flows to find where it’s called from and replace them with Advanced Triggers too (I can probably skip a bunch of Flows I know definitely don’t have any announcements).
