// the find
alandtse/alexa_media_player
This is a custom component to allow control of Amazon Alexa devices in Home Assistant using the unofficial Alexa API.
A Home Assistant custom component that reverse-engineers the Alexa API to expose Echo devices as media player entities. It's for HA users who want their Alexas to participate in automations — announcements, music control, alarm states — without buying into Amazon's official integrations. Active development, HACS-default listed, which means it has some quality bar.
Covers a surprisingly wide surface: media playback, alarms, notifications (text-to-speech announcements), switches, sensors, and even light control for Echo devices with screens. The coordinator pattern is used correctly — shared polling, proper refresh coordination, not the old per-entity polling mess. Semantic versioning with an auto-generated CHANGELOG means you can actually track what broke when Amazon changed something. Translation coverage across 17+ locales is unusually thorough for a community project of this size.
The whole thing is built on an unofficial API that Amazon can break without notice — and they do, regularly. Expect periodic auth failures and broken features after Alexa app updates, with no SLA on fixes. The README is thin to the point of uselessness; all real documentation lives in a GitHub wiki, which means it can fall out of date silently. Test coverage is shallow — the test files exist but they're mostly config flow and entity wiring; the actual API interaction code has minimal test surface, so regressions in the Amazon-facing layer are caught by users, not CI. There's no graceful degradation when the unofficial API changes; the whole integration tends to go dark rather than partial.