[nooneelse]

Warning, dirty, dirty, quick hack idea ahead... to use it for voice interface alone with all thinking and actions done by some other computer or machine(s). Encode commands for the other computer as sound files which that computer can listen for. Using just a few, easy to bandpass-filter tones in the sound files, one can encode a great many commands that are easy for the actual automation machine(s) to distinguish. (One bit of beauty here to this hack is that, it doesn't even have to be a single automation computer hooked to everything, little embedded systems throughout the house can each listen for just the commands they need to worry about.)

Then one says "Echo, play 'Start my heating'". The Echo plays what it thinks is a short song named 'Start my heating' by that band "My Hacked Home Controls" which you seem to like so much, which goes "beep beep boop whisle click", and the other machine(s) hears that easy to interpret command and does what you want. If you need information back, have the(a) machine put that information into a "Results" sound file and add/overwrite it to the command/music library which the Echo can see and play from, then tell the Echo to play that file for you to hear. You say, "Echo play 'Backups Status'" and it plays the voice you assigned to your backup monitor telling you whatever.

Basically, the Echo becomes a translation droid between you and the computer(s) that you have deeper/more control of. And as a bonus, depending on how you encode the commands into sounds, you might be able to learn some of the more common whistle sequences from your translation droid, and just do them yourself.

[supergeek133]

You just turned it into the Rube Goldberg version of Home Automation. Hahahaha.