Alexa Media Player is a custom Home Assistant component that lets people who own Amazon Echo devices control them as media players through the unofficial Alexa API.

What it is

Alexa Media Player is a Python custom component for the Home Assistant home-automation platform, distributed through the HACS integration repository and released under the Apache-2.0 licence. It lets Amazon Echo products appear and behave as Home Assistant media devices, so their playback and metadata become available to the rest of a Home Assistant installation alongside its other entities. The component mimics the behaviour of the Alexa app by speaking to the unofficial Alexa API.

The problem it solves is that Amazon Echo devices are otherwise closed off from Home Assistant: without this component there is no way to treat an Echo as a controllable media player or to surface what is playing on it inside Home Assistant. The README is explicit that the integration relies on an unofficial API that Amazon may cut off access at any time, so its continued operation is not guaranteed by Amazon.

Key capabilities

• Play, pause and stop playback on Amazon Echo products exposed as Home Assistant media devices.
• Skip to the next or previous track.
• Adjust device volume.
• Retrieve the song title for display inside Home Assistant.
• Retrieve the artist's name and the album name of the current track.
• Retrieve the album image for display alongside the other track metadata.
• Contribute translations through the project's Lokalise project, with native speakers invited to join the team.

Who uses it and how

• Home Assistant users who own Amazon Echo products and want those devices controllable as media players from their Home Assistant instance.
• People contributing to the component's documentation, since the wiki is described as a group effort covering usage and useful automations.
• Translators, who join the Lokalise team to localise the component's interface strings.
• Contributors of all kinds, including those who do not write code: the README invites users to file bugs and feature requests and to answer questions in the repository and on the Home Assistant forums.
• Testers, per the linked Home Assistant forum thread asking for Echo device and Alexa-as-media-player testers.

Getting started

Installation and configuration instructions are held in the project wiki rather than the README, so the recommended path is to follow the wiki's Configuration page; the component is available as a HACS default repository and additional documentation and automations live in the same wiki.

How it compares

This registry names no other projects in this category for Alexa or Home Assistant media playback, so Alexa Media Player stands alone here.

When to use it — and when not

Prospective users should understand the central risk stated in the README: the component depends on an unofficial API that mimics the Alexa app, and Amazon may cut off access at any time, so automations built on it can break without notice from this project. Anyone who needs a formally supported, stable integration for controlling Echo devices should not pick it, and people who are unwilling to read a separate wiki for configuration will find the README thin. On the plus side, the project is actively maintained with a recent last push, an Apache-2.0 licence, CI validation and semantic-release workflows, and 16 open issues indicate active but not overwhelming support demand.