Use Alexa Echo as Player such as Chromecast

General Discussions Plex Features
1

I have been desperately waiting for the alexa skill to appear for Plex. This was the only reason why I signed up for the plex pass.
I have several echos in the house and I would like to use them as media players for my NAS library. Especially the kids would like to hear all the podcast/child stories/books on my server.
Now, it turned out that the voice command is totally not reliable (in german, english might be better) which is also root caused by mixed english/german titles etc. I understand that this is something which is very hard to do better. What I do not understand is the following: Honestly, voice command is just second priority, first is to be able to hear the music/stories on those speakers and for that a playlist control over the app would be totallly sufficient. E.g. I select in the app what song to be played and as player I chose the echo which I want it to play. This feature should not be rocket science and much more important than unreliable voice command. I see that it is supported for chromecast and other players but why is it not supported for alexa?

Please do not suggest that I should use bluetooth to pair my echo, this is not a good solution as it breaks up once i leave the room and I have to leave my phone in the kids room.

Any idea if that is something which will be supported in the future?

2

This is a limitation set by Amazon right now. 3rd party apps are not allowed to tell which Echo device to play from. If you want music to play from that device, you have to initiate it from that device.

3

Hi MovieFan, thank you for your promt response. That is of course unfortunate to hear. I hope that Amazon will add that feature to the sdk soon as otherwise I will need to move away from Alexa to Google which offers that functionality. Once this functionality is added by Amazon does Plex plans to add that feature to the player?

4

That is the plan. This is something Plex wants to be able to do too.

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