Very interesting, and hope that we can somehow get the Echo to also use a custom Skill without having to say the ‘Skill’ name first, and do more than just ON/OFF/DIM like the Amazon Echo HA Bridge seemingly offers! Please let me know if you uncover any other details on this!
Coming down home stretch with a public release of my custom Alexa-HA skill! It might happen later tonight baring any unforeseen complications 
Stay tuned…
Adding my input, Open Garage Door works for me. I have noticed that “Alexa, Open THE garage door” does not work as well as “Alexa, Open Garage Door.”
@mkent - thanks. This is interesting; at it seems Echo is getting a little more lax in how you issue the Hue bridge commands over time. I’ve read elsewhere that if you create a group which includes ‘THE’, then ‘Open THE garage door’ may work for you as well…
If you’d like to do more sophisticated things, like checking the current status of your garage door through the Echo, be sure to check out our Skill. Once configured, it takes care of all different speech utterances for you automatically, which you can see in the sample-utterances.
Best regards,
.
@mkent @d0t Well I will reiterate that from day one setting up my echobridge I have been able to say any of the combinations, Alexa, OPEN the garage door, etc.
Have you guys done the speech recognition excercizes to better acclimate your voice to the echo? I know I did that initially, this was like 6-8 months ago I think. OPEN/CLOSE had always worked for ON/OFF for me.
I think it’s interesting that we are seeing some different results.
@ubergeek - I do recall 
And that is a good point - I personally have not done the training exercise on my Echo!
Since I’ve seen several saying that it’s not possible to make Alexa speak, I just wanted to point out that Bluetooth on the server (and enough proximity to you Echo) is all you need. I have a Bluetooth dongle on my server (for presence detection purposes), and just tried making Alexa speak - and it worked perfectly fine. Unfortunately it’s not the same voice though.
Patrik,
I would like to set up OpenHAB to be able to speak over my Amazon Echo also. Could you please tell me how you set it up? I run OpenHAB on a raspberry pi 3 which has Bluetooth built in.
I guess you could also use a cloud TTS for #3 (using curl and your favorite MP3 player) as long as you can get the Raspberry to play the sound to the Bluetooth speaker.
Tip: If you use the Alexa Echo Bridge REST interface (or similar) for Alexa to communicate with OpenHAB, you will need to add 2-3 seconds of sleep before playing the response sound. Otherwise the Alexa “OK” will silence whatever output you want her to say.
Is it possible just with alexa app to try openhab or is it a must to have at least echo?