---
title: "Ecosystems Part 4: Alexa and Home Assistant (The Flat Above the Shop)"
description: Alexa is the cheapest way into a smart home, but every request goes to Amazon. See how Echo, Ring and Alexa+ work with Home Assistant, and the Zigbee trap.
---

<https://homenetworks.com.au/smart-home-networks-and-iot-blog>

# [Ecosystems Part 4: Alexa and Home Assistant (The Flat Above the Shop)](https://homenetworks.com.au/smart-home-networks-and-iot-blog/amazon-alexa-and-home-assistant)

 Written by [Dave Gilmore](https://homenetworks.com.au/smart-home-networks-and-iot-blog/author/dave-gilmore) | Oct 31, 2026, 4:38:03 AM

*Choosing your ecosystem, part 4 of 8. New to the series? [Start with part 1](https://homenetworks.com.au/smart-home-networks-and-iot-blog/apple-google-or-amazon-choosing-a-smart-home-ecosystem).*

**The short version:** Alexa is the cheapest way to get a whole house talking, and Echo speakers double as surprisingly capable smart home hubs. The rent is low because Amazon makes its money elsewhere, and every word you say to Alexa goes to Amazon’s cloud. Home Assistant can work with Alexa, but the safest way to use Alexa is as the voice at the front door rather than the landlord holding the keys.

From the share house we’ve come to the last building on the street: a cheap, well-located flat above Amazon’s own department store. The lifts work, the rent’s a bargain, and there’s always a sale on downstairs. Just don’t be surprised when the landlord knows what time you get home.

## The building manager is also a salesperson

Amazon’s hubs are its Echo speakers and Echo Show displays. The larger and newer Echos do far more than play music. Several include a built-in Zigbee hub, and many are Thread border routers and Matter controllers too, so a single Echo can run bulbs, sensors and plugs from dozens of brands without any other hub in the house. It’s the main reason Alexa homes tend to be the biggest. It’s so easy to keep adding things.

Alexa+, Amazon’s generative AI version of the assistant, launched in Australia in August 2026. It handles longer conversations and more complicated requests, and can act on your behalf in some services. It’s included with Amazon Prime (AU$9.99 a month or AU$79 a year) or AU$29.99 a month on its own, a price that’s clearly designed to make Prime look like the obvious choice.

## What the landlord can see

Of the three landlords, Amazon’s visitor book is the thickest. Every Alexa voice request is sent to Amazon’s cloud for processing. In March 2025 Amazon removed the setting that let some Echo devices process requests locally, and Alexa+ depends on cloud processing by design. Voice recordings are kept by default unless you change the retention setting in the Alexa app, which is worth doing on day one.

Beyond voice, Amazon sees the device states and routines for everything Alexa controls, plus the shopping, music and Prime habits it already knows about. Ring, Amazon’s camera and doorbell brand, adds video to the picture. Ring is cloud-first, and the useful features sit behind a Ring subscription. Ring has also attracted more privacy controversy than any other camera brand, most recently over a facial recognition feature for doorbells that launched in the US in late 2025 and has since drawn lawsuits. Whether or not it reaches your doorbell, it shows the direction of travel.

## The Zigbee trap

There’s one Alexa-specific gotcha we see in nearly every Amazon home we visit. Zigbee devices paired to an Echo’s built-in hub belong to that Echo. Amazon gives you no way to export them or share them with another controller. They work beautifully right up until you want to move them, at which point every sensor and bulb has to be reset and paired again one by one.

If you’re starting fresh and want Alexa, we’d suggest pairing Zigbee devices to a dedicated Zigbee radio on Home Assistant and letting Alexa control them from there. For anything new, prefer Matter devices, which can be shared with several controllers at once.

## Four ways Alexa and Home Assistant work together

**Letting Alexa control Home Assistant.** The Alexa Smart Home skill for Home Assistant lets you say "Alexa, turn on the pool lights" for any device Home Assistant controls. As with Google, the easy route is a Home Assistant Cloud subscription (US$6.50 a month, being renamed Home Assistant Link in December), where you pick exactly which devices Alexa is allowed to see. The free route is a manual setup through an Amazon developer account and an AWS Lambda function. That’s a solid weekend project, and it needs maintaining.

**Controlling Echo devices from Home Assistant.** Since mid-2025, Home Assistant’s Alexa Devices integration can see your Echos and use them: announcements, text-to-speech alerts, sending commands as if you’d spoken them, and reading some built-in sensors. It needs your Amazon account to use an authenticator app for two-step verification rather than SMS codes, and Amazon’s rate limits mean it isn’t instant. For "the washing’s finished" or "someone’s at the gate" announcements, it does the job well.

**Bringing Ring into Home Assistant.** Home Assistant’s Ring integration picks up doorbell presses, motion events and camera snapshots, which is enough to trigger automations like turning on the porch light. It’s all through Ring’s cloud, so it has the same dependency as the Ring app itself.

**Sharing Matter devices.** Matter devices in Alexa can be shared with Home Assistant through multi-admin, so both can control them at once. Thread is less friendly. Apple and Google both let Home Assistant import their Thread network credentials through the companion apps. Amazon doesn’t offer an equivalent, so in an Alexa home we normally run Home Assistant’s own Thread network rather than trying to join Amazon’s.

## Where Amazon’s devices sit on your network

Alexa is the easiest of the three to segment. When you tap a light in the Alexa app, the command goes from your phone to Amazon’s cloud and back down to the Echo, so your phone and the Echo don’t need to be on the same network at all. Echos go on VLAN 50 with the IoT devices, phones stay on VLAN 10, and nothing in between needs opening up apart from the usual mDNS reflection if you want to use Spotify Connect or AirPlay to an Echo.

Keeping Echos off VLAN 10 is worth doing. Alexa actively scans its local network looking for devices it knows how to control. On VLAN 50 all it finds is the bulbs and plugs it’s meant to manage. On VLAN 10 it would be looking at your laptops and phones.

Ring is harder. In [The Seating Chart](https://homenetworks.com.au/smart-home-networks-and-iot-blog/part-6-the-seating-chart-which-devices-belong-on-which-network), VLAN 15 (Cameras, Locks and Security) was cut off from the internet entirely, with cameras recording to a local NVR. Ring cameras and doorbells don’t work without Amazon’s cloud. If you keep them, give Ring devices internet access only, with no route to anything else in the house. If you’re replacing them, a local camera system with an NVR or Home Assistant handling recording keeps footage of your front door off someone else’s servers.

## Who should sign this lease

Alexa is the right landlord for budget-conscious Prime households who want the widest device compatibility and the lowest entry price, and who are comfortable with Amazon processing every voice request.

If that’s you, our advice is to rent the voice and own the house. Let Echos be the friendly speaker in each room, but pair devices to Home Assistant and expose them to Alexa from there. You get Alexa’s convenience without Alexa holding the only set of keys.

## Coming up

We’ve now met all three landlords. Next we look at the option where nobody else holds the keys: Home Assistant as the neutral ground underneath Apple, Google and Amazon, and what owning your smart home looks like day to day.

[View full post](https://homenetworks.com.au/smart-home-networks-and-iot-blog/amazon-alexa-and-home-assistant)

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