How do I program the Doorbell to announce a message to the person outside?

I tried a few times and not seeing any difference. You wait for it to finish booting, yes? I also can’t find any documentation of this procedure.

Okay the Echo Flex arrived today and I managed to create a working Routine entirely within Alexa. Sharing it here with my fellow Wyze Doorbell owners:

Essentially, it’s as follows:
When Front Door is pressed
Alexa will:
Set Volume to 10
Announce “Someone is at the Front Door” on all inside Alexa devices
Announce “We are on our way to the front door. Thank you for waiting.” from the porch Echo Flex
Announce “Computer, Turn on the TV and Show me the Front Door” from the Living Room Echo to the Fire Cube
Set Volume back to 5.

Now if I/we can only find a command to temporarily rotate the Fire TV screen by 90 degrees! LOL!

(And I will probably add a conditional branch to omit any response at the porch Echo Flex for when we are in Away status with Alexa.)

1 Like

I think, if you use the “Custom” option under “Add Action”, and place the same “Turn on the TV and Show me the Front Door” command (without saying Alexa", and it will perform that request. That way with volume at 10, your visitors will not hear you are bring it up on the TV. Try it.

2 Likes

I was going my to say exactly what @Sam_Bam said. A Custom routine is better than trying to get one Echo to respond to another.

Edit: it might need to be the last step so you wouldn’t end with a volume change.

1 Like

Sam_Bam and Customer - Great suggestions! I will give them a try and report back!

1 Like

BINGO! THAT MAKES IT WORK PERFECTLY!
Thank you both!
PS - My experience has been that you can move any routine step, even custom ones, in the order you prefer by dragging.

1 Like

“Edit: it might need to be the last step so you wouldn’t end with a volume change.” Yes, this was true until recently. Now you can move that custom command up or down as needed.

Incidentally, for those that use and those that are listening, When creating a new or editing an existing Voice controlled routine, we can add additional trigger phrases so there’s more than one way to execute that routine. That’s pretty cool. We can go back to existing voice activated routines and edit/add another trigger.

2 Likes

Wow that must require an app update. I tried it to make sure before posting what I did above and the skill call still needed to be at the end. Thanks. :slight_smile:

Oh and you have to spell your skill phonetically sometimes for this method. It really didn’t like the correct spelling for “B-Hyve” sprinklers.

That’s very interesting! In the past I did that by modifying the blueprint Q & A Skill to put the answer in the Question and vice versa. For example, after my morning reminder to take my meds, if I answer “yes” or “yes I did” or similar expressions, Alexa says: “That’s great! I’m proud of you!”
But if I reply “No” or “Not Yet” or “I forgot” then Alexa says something like “No problem, would you like me to remind you again in an hour?”
Corny but funny and it does keep me on track.
Sound like now I won’t have to twist a skill blueprint to set ones like this up.

It also means Alexa is gradually starting to work more and more like SmartThings, which I suspected would happen if we were/are just patient.

1 Like

Is it possible to make the google assistant trigger the video when the doorbell is pushed yet? Or do I need for the official integration they said was coming at launch… still waiting

1 Like

I’m no longer waiting for little companies to solve big company problems. Amazon, Google and Apple have the money and breadth of skilled programmers to do the heavy lifting. The small companies are able to get to market faster and more nimbly with clever innovations, but not when it comes to programming product integration,
As in this thread, I started out looking for a way to “program the (Wyze) Doorbell” but ended up discovering that the solution lay with Alexa. I have come to the conclusion that we are always going to have to look to the big three or their successors.
Same thing with putting the ingenious Wyze cameras up on computer screens. No point in wasting time and anger and pouting over whether/when Wyze should or does do it for us when solutions for putting Android and iPad apps up on Windows and Mac already exist, have for several years and keep getting better and better.
I’m doing integration through Alexa more and more, and I would suggest that you in like manner might consider looking to Google.

@Sam_Bam , do you or anyone else know if we can finally have more than one custom action in an Alexa routine?

I’m trying every way I can figure to have an Alexa phrase that will disable person announcements on command. But I can’t seem to affect more than one camera’s announcements at a time…

1 Like

Give an example and I may be able to help.
I learned some new tricks recently while programming the Wyze Doorbell through Alexa.

1 Like

@Customer, wow, that’s a good one. That’s a good question and a good trick we need to work on. I have more than one custom action in some of my routines. I have some routines that have 25+ lines in them. Turning lights on and off 5-10 seconds apart so I can gauge how long since the trigger occurred that started the routine.

I don’t have Cam Plus on one of my hidden Wyze V3 on my porch. So, I can’t use the person detection. But I still have one Sense V1 motion sensor outside the hiding/house where the camera is. The motion sensor triggers the announcement via Alexa and the camera’s Continuous recording collects the image.

Have you considered trying “pause” or Alexa, quit" as the custom action?

Need to play around with this one a while. But please like @nls asked can you give us an example? Substitute something that protects your privacy.

I I stopped using the choice “Alexa Says”. Instead I sub Messaging > Announcements. Even when I want to select only one Alexa device to report. Allows me to select different ones, There’s also Messaging > Notifications that will send a notice to the phone. We CAN have it both ways. And I use Device Settings > Volume to raise and lower the voice so it does not annoy even me.

I hid an Echo Dot with its own power in a porch lite. One would never know its there. I can give it commands to open the garage door or unlock the Kwikset e-Lock (requires a PIN too) when I get home. Handy - so very handy.

2 Likes

Thanks for the interest, guys. I mostly asked here because Sam had mentioned the new Alexa app supports reordering the custom action; if it also supports multiple custom actions then it’s worth me hunting down. (I don’t use Google Play Store, and the only APK repository I trust, APKMirror, doesn’t carry Alexa.)

I turned off announcements under Devices for 3 cameras and then wrote an equivalent person detection routine for each of them. But I can’t get a single “Disable Person Detection” routine to turn them all off. I would need multiple custom actions - “disable Cam1 Routine”, “disable Cam2 Routine”, etc.

This may be beside the point, though, because ever since I started doing this today my previously rock solid person announcements have become very unreliable. My main front camera hasn’t announced all day. And of course I checked the routine syntax et al…

1 Like

That’s what I did in solving the instructions dilemma for the Wyze Doorbell. Three announcements:
“Someone is at the Front Door” by the Echo’s in the rooms most likely to reach us.
“We are on our way … etc. etc.” by the Echo Flex on my front porch.
“Show me the Front Door” by my Fire Cube

1 Like

I wish this was possible on Google assistant

I also inserted “Wait 5 seconds” and doubled normal volume when the doorbell is pressed and took it back down to normal after the last step in the routine.

1 Like

There have been some videos on Youtube when people have combined both Google and Alexa, buying the low-end model when it temporarily is price-cut as a special. e.g. the prior generation Echo Dot can sometimes be picked up for under $25.

I do the same. Add a Volume reduction or restore at the bottom of most routines.

When I use the announcement command and have more than one device “say it”, I sometimes hear them “say it”, out of sync and its annoying. Maybe Amazon will fix this some time. In the meant time, I still use the Announcement command and have “say it” but just one device, then Wait 10 seconds and Announce same thing again with another device. That eliminates the annoying out of sync announcements and spreads alert so I can hear it in more than one part of the house.

Right now we can’t copy and paste the words of the announcement between other commands or routines, maybe Amazon will give us that later. In the mean time since I have to type the announcements again, I vary the wording just a little, so I can recognize which announcement is occuring/ that I am hearing in case I need to adjust volume or wait time.

1 Like