Is it possible to have Alexa whisper responses?

Add-ons Bindings
,
1

Subject says it all – use case: I have a rule that, when activated, sets my alarms for the following morning – something like
sendCommand(echo_TextCommand, “wake me up at 7 am to country music”)
sendCommand(echo_TextCommand, “wake me up at 7:15 am to rock music”)
sendCommand(echo_TextCommand, “wake me up at 7:30 am to wake up music”)

This works well. The only problem is, I go to bed later than my wife, and alexa says “Alarm set for 7 am to …” followed shortly with “Alarm set for 7:15 am to …” etc etc, which wakes her up. Ideally, I’d like echo to whisper these things back so that I can still get audible confirmation, and she can sleep without my interruption…

I have tried setting both volume and textToSpeechVolume but neither seemed to change anything (admittedly I might be doing something wrong … but those would not “whisper” I don’t think. I also tried adding amazon:effect=“whispered” and </amazon:effect> tags in the text command but that didn’t work at all either.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

2

According to the documentation for the textToSpeech channel, it supports SSML delimited by the <speak> tag.

<speak>I want to tell you a secret.<amazon:effect name="whispered">I am not a real human.</amazon:effect></speak>
3

Thanks – that is for textToSpeech – I am using textCommand; it does not seem that the tags are recognized with textcommand.

4

I missed that part. I don’t believe this is possible as input. You might want to temporary lower your echo device volume while issuing the command via the volume channel.

5

Thx. I was able to get this working (lower volume).

Thanks!

1 Like
6

Did you by chance figure out a way to have the unit not acknowledge the volume change with a beep? I have 2 rules (one morning, one evening) that sets the volume on all echos to sane values but they give an annoying quick beep each time.

7

OMG, would love to know how to stop this.

Best, Jay